Galeri Bosfor is hosting Erman Özbaşaran's fourth solo show, "Equilibrium" from January 20th to March 11th. The exhibition features large-scale paintings that focus on surface and color, and in which the artist interprates the memory of the gaze into a visual language.
In the exhibition titled "Equilibrium", Özbaşaran focuses on the horizon, the division of the surface, the effects of color, and the balance of composition in his large-scale paintings. The artist reexamines the perception of time and space that is encoded in our gaze at a landscape, with the variability of the landscape in our memory and recollection. The traces of a gaze encoded in a landscape lead the artist on a journey from meaning to technique on the painting surface.
In the "Axis" series, Özbaşaran examined the distant landscape, horizon, and axis with a concentrated gaze. The artist, who centers the problem of time-space on the surface of the painting, divides the surface into two with a horizon line, indicating how the present is separated and united with the past and future. The numerous and jointly presented paintings of the same size differ from each other with differences in texture, color, and light. In "Equilibrium", the artist scales the "Axis" series and creates an effect of reaching the whole through the balance between the parts on a large scale. In "Equilibrium" a more challenging process involving technical and compositional elements comes into play. It is as if the series produced by the artist expands and opens up, challenging its own limits with technical possibilities.
The paintings in the "Equilibrium" exhibition are predominantly earth tones. The artist progresses with the colors of the geography that he is most familiar with, where he lives and is accustomed to. In the paintings where oil paint is used on the surface with a printlike delicacy, both color blocks and the variety of a single tone catch the eye. The light values captured with color differences on a single surface, the liveliness and stillness provided with varied texture effects, give these paintings a plain dynamic. With a balance approaching the golden ratio of a photograph frame, these paintings highlight Özbaşaran's mastery of color, line, technical details, and composition.
The "Eqilibrium" exhibition, in which spatial orientation is transferred from the mind to the painting surface, is presented as a confrontation between the artist's gaze and the viewer's gaze. First, the artist himself becomes an observer with his gaze at the landscape; then the viewer of the painting. With the influence of the large scale, the painting opens up to a horizon beyond being viewed. In his observation along the surface, Özbaşaran reduces the landscape to the nature. While forests, lands, mountains, and seas between the earth and the sky are chosen in some places, in compositions where half spheres are included, the existence of the earth creates a familiarity of being worldly.
