Horizon of Things

Horizon of Things
Onur Kaya
Translation by Emre Meydan

"They did not speak, they did not sing, they remained generally silent, almost determinedly silent; but from the empty air they conjured music. Everything was music, the lifting and setting down of their feet, certain turns of the head, their running and their standing still, the positions they took up in relation to one another... , [their] lying flat on the ground and going through complicated concerted evolutions..."1

 

Juhani Pallasmaa's book "The Eyes of the Skin" intends to create a "conceptual short circuit"2 between the sense of vision, which he considers the dominant sense, and other senses like touch and hearing. While criticizing the hegemony of sight, he points out the significance of "peripheral vision", which "envelopes us in the flesh of the world", over focused vision. By combining the other senses, which he defines as the "unconscious of vision", he turns sight into a multi-sensory experience.

 

Though Yunus Emre Erdoğan's works have a strong relationship to sight, they also appear to aim to create a short circuit through other senses, in a way similar to Pallasmaa. Erdoğan, whom we can think of as a still-life painter, has been working on a series entitled "Sounds of Secrecy", in which everything seems to be just a touch away. Objects in an analogous relationship such as window blinds, cactus, toilet paper, radiator and curtains provoke our tactile sense. Yet despite their tactility, these objects take on a mysterious appearance in their loneliness, as if they were from outer space. They look as if they could create an unexpected disturbance in space. They imply a threshold, which, initiated by our touch, could throw everything off routine and result in nothingness. Attempting to touch them is as meaningless as touching a projection screen in a movie theater or a television screen. We're reduced to a gaze looking from the outside, observing a world, to which it can't belong. It's not clear anymore on which side we're standing. At these moments our gaze might become the subject of the painting or even its implicit object.

 

It's during these ambiguous moments when Erdoğan's spaces reveal their secret power. His open compositions of interiors are places where objects vanish and reappear. Objects emerge as if to fill a void carved in space. The artist hides all the invisible and abstract elements of the space in these objects. Thus space gives the object a presence and grants it a sculptural form that dissolves in itself.

Erdoğan's objects leave an impression similar to the furniture music of Erik Satie. For furniture music "isn't intended for listening; it's a kind of music that can join the noise surrounding it".3 Similarly, the artist's objects exist in the multi-colored nature of the space as elements of balance, as frontiers.

 

The objects presented at the show "Horizon Of Things" too are merely apparitions, in deep tranquility. In this series Erdoğan depicts with minimalistic and multiple means an interior which makes ambiguous the concepts of time and space and extends outwards to such an extent that it influences the outside as well. His point of view implies the outside from the inside and stretches the boundaries of the inside. We can't tell anymore whether we're looking at a valley or the corner of a room. This enigma of boundaries is an inherent characteristic of Erdoğan's work. It's a constant back and forth between the boundaries of virtual space and real space, of inside and outside, of existence and nothingness, of shadow and light, of emptiness and fullness. This oscillation is one of the most interesting aspects of Erdoğan's art.

Just as Chirico places pieces of furniture in his outdoor paintings, Erdoğan presents his monumental looking objects (which do not provide us with more than just bits of meaning) in a virtual space. Unlike in his previous works, objects now look as if they've been left in the middle of empty space. Were they left there? Did they fall from the sky? We can't tell. They just sit there, as empty pointers.

The objects for the series "Horizon of Things" were picked according to their acoustic qualities. The artist builds the analogy of these objects with regard to their sound reflection and absorption characteristics. Sound is non-existent but implied. The objects are as silent as rocks. According to John Cage, "silence is not the opposite of sound; it's the act of not listening to the perpetual sounds surrounding oneself".4 Cage came to this realization after entering an anechoic chamber. In a similar way, with his show "Horizon of Things" Erdoğan seems to have decided that the best way to express the "sounds of secrecy", which we can not make anything of, is empty space. The fluidity of sound and its lack of distance pushes the range of the eye in a similar way the infinity of horizon does. Now we begin to have an idea about the essence of objects. As empty pointers they morph into a form which allows us to attach any meaning to them. "In this manner, we are told, the system of imaginary is spread circularly, by detours and returns the length of an empty subject." 5

 

1 Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, The MIT Press, 2006, p.181
2 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2005, p. 10
3 http://ravelinbolerosu.com/gnossienne-1/
4 Excerpt from an article by Hira Doğrul, Siyahi Magazine, Issue 2, 2005, p. 115
5 Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, Hill and Wang, 1982, p. 32