Visual Arts

Yallay Gallery & Jean Marc Decrop is pleased to present Istanbul Art Scene: Horasan + Nejat Sati, an exhibition in collaboration with the gallery PI-Artworks, featuring artworks by Turkish artists Mustafa Horasan and Nejat Sati.

Horasan is one of Turkey’s most important and influential portrait artists. He works across a wide range of media, including ink drawings, printmaking and photography, but he is best known for his large-scale oil paintings. The foundation of each painting is a thick but uniformly applied layer of paint that creates a colour gradient or simple pattern. Then, while it is still wet, the artist furrows away paint to create intricate filigree patterns. The patterning and flatness of this backdrop makes it reminiscent of wallpaper or a portrait photographer’s backdrop. In contrast to this, the human subject in the foreground, depicted in close-up, is realised using thick, gestural layers of colourful paint.

“Labyrinth” can be considered an extension of Horasan’s “Crash Series” which Horasan created in interaction with the works of artists he has faced many times during his artistic life. “In today’s environment, just like the audience, I find myself in a labyrinth of acts and emotions whenever I encounter a work of art. This is either the labyrinth of the world of the artwork or that of the artist. Within the labyrinth, what do you feel? The state of questioning this situation is the main theme of the exhibition,’’ the artist says about his works on display.

“Horasan uses the universal figure of the labyrinth and its symbolism as his paradigm; he produces a visual field that is open to resonances of sound and image, practice and imagination. His paintings are placed in an “other geography” which reflects the iconographic universe of the artist. They come into existence through experiencing the texture of the painting material; they sculpt time and make use of the surface of the canvas. His unique works are designed like stones added to a building undergoing construction. Every single work is surrounded by a network of imaginary and iconographic references with which the artist can open and give shape to the comprehension of the viewer.” ——Selen Ansen

Nejat Sati is part of a generation of artists who have utilised technical innovations to renovate the discipline of painting. Prior to commencing work, Sati mixes acrylic paint with a viscous, quick-drying gel to create his own signature material, which is applied to his canvases by either brush or squeegee. There is inevitably a learning curve to using this alternate medium, filled with unexpected incidents, sometimes welcomed, sometimes not, as he learns how his colours interact and the materials increased transparency affects his outcomes.

In Structure series (2013), Nejat Sati uses a squeegee to repeatedly pull various layers of colour across his pictures plane, ridding the canvas of all unnecessary details and shapes and presenting his material in the simplistic way imaginable. Due to the semi-transparent nature of his pigmented gel, the artist’s does not have full control of the painterly process and small bands of underlying colour peer through from under the paint that covers them.