Ahora soy definitivamente un axolotl y si pienso como un hombre es solo porque todo

axolotl piensa como un hombre dentro de su imagen de piedra rosa.*

Cortázar

 

The misleading tendency to associate overt formal resemblance as a key to impute a kinship of theory or intent between an artist and his forebears is a condition to which advanced contemporary painting is especially vulnerable; and this is no less true of the work of Erdoğan Zümrütoğlu.

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In this light, it can be equally illuminating to consider what Zümrütoğlu’s work is not, despite any ostensible formal corollaries, as a precondition for examining what the work is, specifically, and unto itself.

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Despite a general roughness of aspect that Expressionists favored, Zümrütoğlu’s work is not Middle-European Expressionism—neither of the sort that emerged in the early 20th century, nor of its recapitulation by Baselitz, Schönebeck, and other artists of the postwar whom critics and public in Germany would rescue from trivial imitation of earlier art historical precedent, by emphasizing the significance of the reassertion of such explicitly German visuality in the context of the postwar, and against the auto-referential Modernism rooted in the School of Paris as it developed into Informel during the same period. What Expressionists expressed was feeling, for them the sine qua non of the aesthetic act, and consistent with their recollection that the very word aesthetic derives from the Classical Greek word for feeling.

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This is not to say that Zümrütoğlu’s work is devoid of expression, but its formal interplay between figuration and its own materiality, is too ironic and deliberate in its theoretical consciousness, to evoke a relevant kinship with German Expressionism. The imputation of any such kinship would be merely formal in a way that necessarily would be segregated from the theoretical positions of each, i.e. Expressionism and Zümrütoğlu’s work. In the case of the latter, any such formal relation would be subsumed by other criteria to be elaboratedsubsequently in the present text.

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A perhaps more bizarre imputation of association through supposed formal kinship, is the characterization of Zümrütoğlu as “a Turkish Francis Bacon” despite that Bacon’s two conspicuous formal and technical traits are absent in Zümrütoğlu’s work, and, necessarily absent, as their inclusion would be incompatible with the fundamental tensions his work evinces between representation and materiality.

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Ever since the inception of Bacon’s signature style with his Painting of 1947, Bacon’s work asserted two discrete perspectival projection systems: one for the figure, and another for the ground. Zümrütoğlu’s figures on the other hand consistently inhabit the same perspectival projection, and this fact is a necessary consequence of the works’ conceptual program. Bacon distorted his figures by means of a technique that introduced a degree of accident whose result was only visible ex post facto: the smudge. Typically, Bacon would apply a rag or a sponge to a painted face, and twist it—in this play of accident and intention, Bacon’s means of rendering faces were consistent with those of the techniques of artists of his generation on both sides of the Atlantic, those of Abstract Expressionism in New York and Informel in continental Europe. In this purely technical sense, Zümrütoğlu, in practice, is closer to Soutine than to Bacon: he paints his figures directly without the sort of imposed accident that only becomes visible ex post facto. This fact does not compromise spontaneities that remain immediate to the artist in the course of their development in an image.

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In fact, the most relevant tension underlying Zümrütoğlu’s work is neither that of competing perspectival projection systems in their schemata, nor that of accident and intention in the manner of their execution, but between figuration and pure materiality. In this sense, these works continually shift between two opposed theoretical categories of painting: that of illusionistic mimetic representation, and that of painting as materialobject distinct from representation. In effect, Zümrütoğlu’s figures oscillate between representation, and the evidence of marks that together constitute objects of pure pigment applied by means of brush, tube, or knife. This approach subsumes two art historical conditions, that of Physical Abstraction as embodied by certain works of Richter (b.1932) and Lavier (b. 1949), and in the predominant works of Ryman (b.1930), and James Hayward (b.1943)—besides other artists since the 60s—and the tradition of distortion in figuration that derives from the Middle Ages and culminates in the 20th century.

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Here it is worth noting that this tradition of Physical Abstraction, in the sense of painting as pure pigment, has no conspicuous precedent in the history of Turkish painting since 1945. This is not to say that the dominant paradigm of Turkish abstraction was hard-edged and compositionally fluid like the signature style of Fahrelnissa Zeid (b.1901) that predominated in her practice since 1947. Neither was Turkish abstraction devoid of textured surfaces. But the idea of painting as pure materiality sprang from the latest impulses of Modernism as they developed in Europe where they were more of an anomaly, and in North America where they posed a formidable alternative to mainstream New York Minimalism in the work of the pair aforementioned: Robert Ryman (also in New York); and in its most extremely rigorous position, in that of Los Angeles painter, James Hayward.

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Implicit in the work of these artists of Physical Abstraction, was the recognition that Minimalism ultimately had failed in its foremost objective, the wish to fulfill once and for all the Modernist dream of dispensing altogether with the referent in order to order to achieve the full autonomy of art by mean of an aspiration to auto-reference. Minimalists insisted on flatness in order to avoid referring to the hand of the artist; they also insisted on geometry in order to avoid referring to nature. But the problem of reference persisted asgeometry threatened, at least in the case of a painting, to refer to the defined image field, or to the surrounding architecture.

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Physical Abstraction however would make a painting into an object rather than a representation, by having the work’s materiality itself become both signifier and signified. This category of work uses an abstract form and medium in order to achieve a concrete end. The painting is about its own materiality: canvas and pigment. It transcends representation by becoming the very things of which it is composed, and to the exclusion of all else. It is neither geometric nor flat because these features do not correspond to the inherent nature of its materiality, which, most often, can even transcend the geometry of the image field due to the thickness and structure of the medium. It can also sustain more than one color without doing violence to the premises from which its claim to legitimacy derives. These features—its chromatic variation and structure—are precisely those that Zümrütoğlu successfully exploits for their potential for compatibility with the very sort of painting which it is the raison d’être of Physical Abstraction to repudiate and transcend: figuration.

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Therein resides the most fundamental tension of Zümrütoğlu’s work. His figures dissolve into their own materiality and return again to their figurative condition. It is therefore appropriate that he contrives their poses so as to appear overtly static in order that they should appear almost frozen even in gesticulation. Any exaggerated illusion of movement would only detract from the internal movement of recirculation of thisdissolution and reconstitution of figure to material pigment and back again.

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This recirculation which first meets the eye as a wholly formal condition, is equally conceptual as the painting flows back and forth between two mutually exclusive conditions: figurative representation and pure object.

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If it is true of the artist’s figures, this dynamic of dissolution and reconstitution is no less true of each painting’s ground. But the artist is scrupulously deliberating in his contrivance of the relations between figure and ground, so as to elicit the maximum possible tension between them. We have observed that, unlike Bacon, or, for that matter, Balthus, figure and ground in Zümrütoğlu each pertain to the same perspectival projection.But dissolution presupposes a progression of the condition visible as such within figure and ground—which is to say that part of the figure is bound to be dissolving into a pigment, and part is still, as it were, “solid,” and still recognizable as representation. Clearly, these hitherto internal conditions reside in tension with each other with respect to the distinction between figure and ground as well. Most often in Zümrütoğlu’s work, the feet, for example, remain evident as such and not yet subject to the same degree of dissolution as superiorparts of the anatomy. If this is the case, as it usually it is, then it is precisely at the feet where the ground is subject to the most radical potential of dissolution. Similarly, where superior parts of the figure’s anatomy have given themselves over to the pure materiality of pigment, and are practically devoid of representational form, these are the sections of the composition wherein the geometry of the ground remains most intact.

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The reason this is noteworthy is not merely for the sake of highlighting a self-evident or potentially utilitarian contrast, but to indicate that the works’ dichotomy of recirculation between dissolution and reconstitution, is not only internal with respect to each figure, but simultaneously engages the pictorial space external to the figure—which is to say that the artist invests the relationship figure/ground with a simultaneous dynamic. This means that the perspectival relationship between figure and ground is not only integrated; it is fluid as well, fluid in the manner of its integration, and in a way that poses a radical tension with the internal dynamics of the figure.

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What is more, the symbolic potentials of these works derive not from what they depict, but rather from the manner of their depiction. Figuration is so ancient that it long predates the classical. But theoretical Physical Abstraction is a development of the postwar. This recirculation therefore also bears the implication of two categories of temporal—which is to say historico-philosophical—opposition: that which the “contemporary” individual experiences relative to the locus of the collective culture, and also that within oneself, between the lure of contemporaneity, and the mysterious sense of security and identity inherent in the cultural conditioning of tradition. Even resistance to the latter entails an implicit recognition of its influence.

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Another symbolic potential of this dichotomy has to do with connotations of materiality. On the one hand, we tend to associate the material with a vision of immanence that would deny the metaphysical, but this is by no means a necessary consequence of an assertion of materiality in painting, wherein the flight from the external referent equally can become a means to escape the quiddity of painting in favor of a vision of painting’s essence, an enterprise that is metaphysical by definition. Representation evokes existence, or that which something is; pure pigment-as-material instead evokes essence or that by which something is. Although for some Physical Abstractionists, this pursuit of essence is the real justification for materiality to the exclusion of representation, it is also a fact that to impute a symbolic association to a striving for materiality entails a tension with the overt fact of its presence. In Zümrütoğlu this tension becomes explicit in the transition from material to figure.

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It is worthwhile to ask, “In these paintings, is it inevitable that we perceive the figure first, and the material second?” The longer we regard them, and the more we pass from one to the other, it seems apparent that this order of perception is contingent rather than necessary. It is possible to perceive them first as figure, first as material, or even simultaneously as both. In this sense, the artist would impose on the nature of his works’receivership a condition that, in effect, reflects the dynamic of mutual transition inherent in the formal and symbolic elements of his work in general. As such, the progress of alternating dissolution and reconstitution within the works implicitly projects itself to the surrounding space external to the works, and into the locus and condition of the receiver. This alternating dissolution of the receiver into the “fictional” pictorial space and vice versa, adds more than an additional layer of irony to the shifting oppositions that generally infuse the work.

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The dichotomy in Zümrütoğlu of figuration and materiality also has potential symbolic associations specific to the historical imperatives of the Turkish condition that also make themselves felt in the West at large. This is none other than the tension between a globalized modernity and the conservative impulse to defend a national tradition against this international tide, a tension that may be expressed in other words by the dichotomy of secular values, and restrictions imposed by juridical and administrative realities.

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* “Now I am definitively an axolotl, and if I think like a man, it’s only because every axolotl thinks like a man within his image of pink stone.” Cortázar, Julio, “El Axolotl” in Final el Juego, Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1964. (Translation of quotation is my own). 

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The text written for the catalogue 'Holy Bargaining' published by Pilevneli Gallery

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