Erman Özbaşaran’s fourth solo exhibition, Ground, reveals the traces we leave on the geography we inhabit, along with architectural details and elements of landscape, through layers of painting dominated by color, minimal interventions, and restrained geometry. The exhibition will be on view at Galeri Bosfor from September 10 to October 10. In painting, the “ground” is the first layer upon which paint is applied. The image does not yet exist; there is only the surface on which it will eventually take shape. Erman Özbaşaran’s new exhibition reconsiders this technical term not merely as the physical ground of painting, but as a way of thinking through painting itself. Rather than constructing an image, Özbaşaran’s paintings trace how a surface comes into being. The canvas is treated with such a dense ground that it almost loses its own texture; each subsequent intervention does not so much add a new layer as make visible the time the surface has undergone. Brushstrokes, traces of tape, or spills of paint continue to exist within the layers beneath which they are buried. Özbaşaran’s ground is a collection of layers prepared not to forget, but to accumulate; records of the painting process become the surface’s own history. Other records emerge on the same surface. Divisions that evoke horizon lines and structures resembling architectural sections seem to promise a window opening onto a place or a landscape, yet the point of reference is now the transformed ground itself. The viewer never arrives at a clearly defined landscape, encountering instead only the remnant of a trace that seems to belong to it. These elements do not represent a specific landscape; they are not images of the world being observed, but rather the behaviors and gestures that world leaves behind on the painting. Color is the only element here that speaks directly; everything else line, form, texture points toward an uncertain memory. The traces of the studio and those of the inhabited geography transform into one another; neither explains nor represents the other, but they coexist on the same surface. In this sense, Ground brings together the physical ground of the canvas and the ground of the geography to which the artist belongs within a single gesture: neither is shown directly; both exist only through the traces they leave behind. For this reason, Ground signifies far more than an initial layer. While making visible the unseen ground beneath the painting, the exhibition also turns the processes operating behind every image into the subject of painting itself. Here, the surface is not a passive support but an active field that stores and transforms information. Painting ceases to be a window opening onto a landscape and instead becomes a plane onto which processes of making, looking, and experiencing are inscribed together. Özbaşaran’s new paintings investigate not the result of looking at a place, but how that act of looking accumulates on the surface. The image becomes not a completed outcome, but a ground that is continually reconstructed. It is precisely for this reason that Ground makes visible not what lies beneath the painting, but the entirety of the construction process through which the painting takes shape in the artist’s mind, along with the traces of geography.
