Mithat Şen’s work titled “Breath” creates a space within space and it reveals the artist’s systematic approach in the context of its form and materiality. The work is 2 meters in length and 20 meters in width and is composed of natural parchment pieces mounted on wooden frames installed without interruption. The multilayered relief is assembled by piecing 40x40 cm squares together and overarching in four directions. The work is built upon the diversification and repetition of the artist’s body schemas through a fragmentary system.
In “Breath” the units of Mithat Şen’s alphabet generate the body schemas sometimes as a whole and at other times through cuts; the full and empty areas within the square forms create a rhythm and evolve uninterruptedly. The pile continues to accumulate sometimes with reductions and sometimes with elevations, layer by layer, in each of 360 squares individually as vell as in their totality. These forms, as parts or a whole, convene within the endless possibilities of the system designed by the artist and they compose a symphony with repetitions and variations. The pile in Şen’s work both reveals the body schema as a whole and diversifies its representations through reductions and shifts.
Throughout his forty-year-long artistic production, Mithat Şen continued to investigate the potentials and possibilities of the knowledge immanent to the geography he persistently refers to as “ancient frontiers”. The principle of production for Şen is based upon the cause -and-effect relationship in the emergence and understanding of visuality within the idiosyncratic climate of a bordered piece of land. Through continuity and simultaneity, “Breath” presents space and time in the context of the repetition and variation principle that exists in nature.
In “Breath” the artist organizes the body units which he divided into thousands of pieces through intensive piling and continuity. The claim of the painting is that the first work can be attached to the last one and the end can be linked to the beginning. “Breath” can be considered a comprehensive compilation of the artist’s method of transforming the form and the material. This recent exhibition is a caesura where the “Body” series converges with “Cosmos” and “İstif” series.
