FULYA ÇETİN
river under river
24 January –23 February 2013
How one is meant to return is wholly washed or dipped in a revivifying and informing water, something
which impresses upon our flesh the odor of the sacred. Each woman has potential access to [...] this
river beneath the river. Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes
“The river-beneath-the river” is a world in which aspects of human nature and vulnerability are revealed
layer by layer. In this world, where each painting can be read as a catalyst of meaning, Fulya Çetin calls
the audience to get in this river and take a journey of their own. In this way, each person can dive into
layers of meaning and discover a unique path by following his or her own intuition.
This exhibition, featuring mostly oil-on-canvas paintings and drawings Çetin has created over the last
couple of years, promises to reveal further meanings when the viewer delves deeper into this world
beneath the river. This is why the most striking common feature of the works here is that they relate to
each other, somehow through their contradictory or conflicting meanings and open the layers. By
portraying a moment containing movement like a frozen digital image, Çetin combines the aesthetics of
the digital image with painting and makes us question the new meanings that emerge from this
combination.
Thus, for example, she juxtaposes a painting of two people who are very close to each other and the
distorted style of painting creates a sense where we do not understand whether they are showing
compassion or violence such as in another painting of a bundle of fragile roses. Similarly, her paintings
in which she looks at an empty road or a patch of woods through a night-vision aesthetic, attribute
wildness to human-made machines (cameras) and innocence to the wild. A similar tension can be
observed between the figures in some of her works. The painting portraying three Japanese tourists
caught between awe and terror and unable to decide whether to move closer to or away from three
swans they happen to see in a pond, suggests an inevitable parallelism with the painting that portrays a
middle class European family on a nice small boat entering a dark canal.
This movement, based on distance, contact and lack of contact between the figures, takes the shape of
obvious but calm conflict in other paintings. The works in which Çetin depicts naked human bodies in
contact with wild animals, when read in relation with the other paintings, show themselves not as an
alternative to humanity’s already lost connection to nature, but as a warning against becoming inured
to this separation.
Taking shape primarily around the themes of vulnerability, conflict, and lack of contact, the deep bonds
between these paintings and the intertwining meanings they express can take anyone to his or her own
river-world. That is why these paintings connecting to each other in zigzags, parallels, and crosses,
invite the audience to realize their own weaknesses and lack of connection and to bathe fully in this
“river-beneath-the river”.
Fulya Çetin (born in Istanbul, 1970) graduated from Mimar Sinan University department of painting in
1995. This is her first solo show with artSümer after the latest one in 2010 titled ‘Collector of
Devastations’. Selected group shows include ‘Güllük Gülistanlık’ (Opelvillen, Germany, 2012), ‘Reality
Terror’ (DEPO, 2012), ‘Animal-like’ (Milk, 2012), Prescript (Rumeli Han, 2012), ‘Where the Fire Struck’
(DEPO, 2011), ‘Good Night’ (Manzara Perspectives), 2011), ‘Plastic Doll’ (Masa Projesi, 2009), ‘Spring
Cleaning’ (Karşı Sanat, 2006). She has participated in projects with the artist initiative Hafriyat Karaköy
many times. The artist lives and works in Istanbul.
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