Gallery F opens its doors in the new year with Assoc. Dr. Metin Kuş's solo exhibition. The exhibition can be seen at F Art Gallery Nişantaşı between 11 January - 15 February. Continuing His artistic work actively in addition to hir academic career, Kuş expresses the conceptual framework of his solo exhibition titled “Rush” with the following words:
“Insufficient time or “timelessness”. Transforming the time that goes on in the natural flow of life as it transforms everything else, the human created his own synthetic time. Time is no longer about the natural flow, the transformation from winter to spring, the growth of trees and babies, nor the natural rhythm of wind and rain. A machine that man transforms and with which he imprisons himself. It is a rush to grow, to train, and establish a realized agenda loaded with all kinds of guidance instruments of the mind, starting anew each day.
On the one hand, an anxious person trying to grow up in an effort to exist and survive on a daily basis, and on the other hand, is a person whose mind and body are busy within the “deadlines” created by the conditioning of “you can, you should”. This state of freneticism that seen in the flow of life is a dimension that attracts attention, and one worth examining pictorially. Daily life can naturally be handled with many different aspects and dimensions, but the state of completing or catching up with something in this rush formed the starting point for the paintings in this exhibition. From this point of view, the daily rush and grind are the most observable characteristics of today’s, especially urban, life which naturally add dynamic, fluid, uncertain, and sometimes indecisive effects to the picture. A Romantic painter or Impressionist painter who takes an idyllic image of nature as their starting point would probably have no difficulty in explaining their ‘theme’. However, when today’s multi-dimensional, multicultural, multi-concept city life is considered as the axis, it is not easy to explain the ‘theme’. Meeting this versatility and intertwining layers only with a pictorial structure woven with a similar intertwining can create a form of expression. The possibilities offered by the concepts of dynamism, fluidity, uncertainty and indecision in the pictorial space, while making Futurist, Baroque, Expressionist connotations and references in one dimension, are also in the contemporary as the plastic expression of those bound by modernity in the dimension of time and space.
Again, this state of panic indicates a singularity equipped with an isolated indifference, separated from the others within the individuality of each person in the dimension of the individual. Explaining a context in the past of the human expression process with pictures has always accompanied plastic anxiety. Again in this process of expression, context is considered as an important compositional element that shows where individuals are and where they are compared to others. This points to social hierarchy which is a traditional thought reflected in the paintings as a lack of context, a lack of hierarchy, and the effort of each individual to live and reflect their own singularity. Therefore, in this state of rush, making clear definitions, talking about relationships or contexts, and analysing compositional structures becomes meaningless and leaves its place to an indefinable flow that each element makes towards obscurity and uncertainty for its own purpose. In this respect, if the paintings in this exhibition create an effect that cannot be defined in the viewer, escapes perception once again and looks different at every glance, then this is an effect that is thematically appropriate. One of the main axis of the exhibition process was to explore the possibilities of transforming the pattern of traditional painting as the image of a frozen moment, with elements such as ambiguity, indecision, and polysemy.
The texts about the picture are difficult texts. Writing more to avoid possible misunderstandings risks narrowing the art’s expressiveness and the viewer’s interpretation space. In conclusion, the expression above is the effort to verbally reflect the starting point of the paintings produced within the scope of this exhibition. It is of course insufficient. If it had a sufficient expression with words, there would be no need for pictures. Despite this, it is an inevitable necessity to present an idea of exit from a common ground with the audience, from the ground of verbal expression. The putting into words of this short text, which was expressed for this purpose, is after the appearance of the pictures. In this process of expression, the main thing is painting, nothing verbal can express the process of painting, nor does it need to. Metin KUŞ, December 2022, İstanbul”
As Istanbul Gelisim University Faculty of Fine Arts, our esteemed faculty member Assoc. Dr. We congratulate Metin Kuş and wish him continued success.
