LOWER AUSTRIA CONTEMPORARY
Faika Ceren ÇAĞLAR (Koop. mit AIR Krems)
Abstract Perception
In her artistic work, the young Turkish artist Faika Ceren Çağlar pursues a stylistic objective which in its essence corresponds to collage, continuously linking formal and content-related elements such as painterly media – e.g. brush and paint – as well as found objects like printed materials. In her frequently playful treatment of objects like book pages, newspaper clippings, paper doilies, pages from a city map and an expired Turkish passport, the artist links the old with the new and the found with the invented, thus exploiting the manifold possibilities inherent to the medium. Moreover, through the artist’s own personal approach, set pieces from the past can be rediscovered or read in a new context.
The beginning of Faika Ceren Çağlar’s artistic process is marked by extended visits to flea markets, where she searches for and collects old books, printed publications and articles of clothing – things that are still intertwined with other people’s memories, their past and their stories, which the artist transports reflectively into her own subjective world, her everyday reality. Through the appropriation and use of these supporting materials, with their underlying narratives, and by means of their transformation in the layers of the paint application, Çağlar draws strength from life itself. Life experiences are what feed and drive these collections of materials, which – reinterpreted and recontextualized – reflect the socio-cultural milieu of the young Turkish artist between the past and the future, between East and West.
While Çağlar’s fragile and exquisite works on paper provide the exhibition visitors with a broad field of possibilities in terms of association and identification, her paintings on canvas are characterized by their abstract effect. Through the tactile nature of the brush strokes and the layering of paint, the pyrotechnics of connotations and subtexts dissolve here into pure painting, thus breaking down in the abstract picture the field referenced in the title between sensory perception and its physical and gestural realization.
Faika Ceren Çağlar was born in Ankara in 1986. She lives and works in Ankara.
Text: Alexandra Hennig
Translation: Douglas Deitemyer
http://www.lac.coop/en/institutions/kunstverein-baden/
http://www.air-krems.at/artists/2014/faika-ceren-caglar
http://www.artmagazine.cc/content80830.html