LEYLA GEDIZ
İstanbul based artist Leyla Gediz deals with how we remember things, and how they stay in our memories. Her paintings are constructed by cognitive, emotional, and physical references of our relationships with space, objects, and others; and they associate images with senses in relation to photographic gaze and cinematic experience. Geneva (2008) looks like a frozen frame from an old movie as if Humphrey Bogart might enter the scene; it creates a filmic atmosphere from an old apartment in Geneva with a film noir-like light inside whereas Republican (2006) reminds of the graffiti one can see on the streets. Terakki (2000) is composed of patterns of a logotype that illustrates a silhouette of a father and a daughter looking at where the father is pointing his finger. They are most likely looking at the translation of its title: Progress-ion. Depending on how they are coded by the artist, the figures and motifs vary from photographic images to filmic fragments, from childlike expressions to graphic elements in their appearances and styles.
Gediz is primarily interested in how we are attached to images and how they become ours. She develops her content by identifying herself with the subjects of her paintings. She personalizes the situations around them during the process of painting. This is why the process of painting has significant impact on her self-perception and conception of the body of work. Considering one of the oldest traditions in painting; she investigates contemporary forms of portraiture, and brings a fresh look on how people, personas and characters are represented in accordance with how we look at them and how we see ourselves in their presence. Portrait (2002) displays a beautiful young girl who looks at us with a sad smile.Gediz establishes an emphatic relationship with Lara whose suicide was a headline in the Turkish press, and identifies herself with her gaze. In another one, Recluse (2006) a man wearing a black overcoat is seen from behind. The overcoat looks as if it is -poetically speaking- as heavy as life, and its depiction creates an emphatic relationship for its viewer with the man regarding the burden of life on his shoulders. It might be read as a contemporary form of the Atlas figure carrying the weight of the heavens on his back.
The installation of 118 drawings entitled Atlantis 2000 (2001) departs from a photograph of Dimitri Starosletsev, one of the soldiers who died when Kursk, the nuclear-powered submarine of the Russian Navy sank in the Barents Sea. Drawing the same face - again and again - and moving away from the photo, Gediz designs a methodological process by positioning drawing as a way of remembering, recalling, forgetting, and commemorating. Her work reflects many aspects of human conditions; from melancholy to euphoria, it is as rich as the life itself and swings from one psychological mood into another. It is connected with our existential questions and perception of reality, dealing with birth, death and transitions in human nature.
Her artistic voice and conceptual versatility operate as a - personally - critical diary. Most of her works have autobiographical references due to their narrative quality and elements of fiction. Similar to a novelists` approach, the codes and references lose their original addresses and gain new symbolic values in the process. Her oeuvre is the reflection of her personal experience with life, and mirroring of it on the painterly forms.
Gediz takes painting as a conceptual base, and experiments with the media in order to investigate its limits and narrative possibilities. Including oil painting, drawing and installation, she uses various techniques and elaborates her painterly language with a material-sensitive approach. She is a painter who can make paintings out of anything under one condition: they must be things that are related or connected with her. Departing from personal codes, she questions her psychological distance to the subjects of her paintings, and her mini-obsessions or strong attachments with these subjects provide hints for abstractions. Collecting fragments of disclosure, isolation, and intimacy from her memory and abstracting them as symbolic gestures of time and space, Gediz fictionalizes various forms of space for her subjects. During this introspective process, she develops tools for de-contextualizing her subjects from their social reality, and repositions them in a timeless setting. They take forms of our collective memory, and stay as how we might remember them in specific moments.
Not only painting, but also exhibition-making can be seen as her artistic media. As a prolific artist, she realized several solo projects by experimenting not only on the media of painting but also on the form and conception of exhibition making. She approaches exhibits as a way of conceptualizing her process of painting, and conceptualizes her presentations with an ambitious artistic vision for unique settings. For instance, she included sound into her site-specific installation, noa noa (2009) and also displayed large scale sculptures in relation to the architecture of the gallery next to her paintings and drawings for her solo project Subject: Free (2009). During her stay at the artist residency program at HIAP of Helsinki, she formed a new beginning by constructing a solo presentation that questions the materiality of painting and the role of the painter in ‘Under Construction’.
This text is written for the gallery catalogue printed by RAMPA, iSTANBUL, 2011
