Sefa Çakır's solo exhibition 'I Closed the Door from the Outside' opens at Vision Art Platform

ISTANBUL

Vision Art Platform is hosting Sefa Çakır's solo exhibition titled "Kapıyı Dışarıdan Kapattım | I Closed the Door from the Outside," which opened on Nov. 20 and runs until Jan. 6 in Istanbul.

"The exhibition features thoughtful and compelling images that evoke unease, reflecting a world where the young feel trapped and the global order seems amiss. Artists generally hold a lexicon and grammar close, keeping their practice, systems, methodologies, and aesthetic habits as discreet and nuanced as possible, adding to the mystery of formalized image-making," according to curator Gary Sangster's text.

"Sefa Çakır does not do that here. Rather, in this exhibition, he is demonstrably precise and specific in making images that can caution, evoke, and resonate in ways that are both thoughtful and compelling.

The sense of these images is that the state of the world is not exactly right and that the young are in a tight spot. There is nothing glamorous or bright here. It is a world of unease. His signatures include somewhat lyrical images of children, the defiant or baleful faces of youths, young mothers holding infants, decrepit wooden houses and buildings, and gigantic bees, as well as deep-hued monochromatic imagery and a form of rendering in marker that might be described as organic pixilation, which creates a kind of vibrating, enlivened surface to his portraiture and an animated texture to the imagery.

Çakır frequently, but not always, ignores the traditional figure-ground relationship of painting and drawing in favor of the seamless, dark backdrop used in photographic portraiture. In two instances, he eschews the plain background for a dark, frenetic rendering of a distant sky. These kinds of subdued presentations compound the sense of seclusion or the somewhat abject resignation of his subjects. In fact, many of Çakır’s environments are either black, almost empty, or broken or bereft.

The skies, when depicted in landscape images with buildings and children, are starkly cloudless and almost always a dull grey—an environment imbued with a sense of something lost or missing or a feeling of melancholy. In this body of work, there is also a sense of poetic narrative, one where there are many more influential events and experiences that have contributed to this particular moment in time that are unseen or elusive. One can surmise that these images are the result of experiences, of people or places, that are otherwise unknowable or invisible to the audience. Nevertheless, because of Çakır's precise arrangements of his lexicon of imagery, structure, and form, these works hint at something otherworldly or intangible.

In some of the work, the artist elects for an extreme closeup, in which he isolates the faces, some with fixed, powerful stares, in a way that the image confronts the viewer as much as the artist confronts the subject. In some senses, Çakır seems to take the role of documentarian, capturing otherwise candid moments, closing in on his subjects, and revealing their sense of confidence and self-awareness. And in some of the building images that form the backgrounds, they appear derelict, like surviving icons of abandonment and disrepair. Yet Çakır upsets the usual characterization of documentarian as witness, or the claustrophobia of simplistic journalistic images, by providing us with a range of viewing angles to engage the subject and the viewer.

In some cases, the artist is sublimating his gaze to the gaze of the subject. He is permitting the subject to control the observational space, which submerges the artist's viewpoint and their invisible control and places the subject in a near-direct dialogue with the viewer. Çakır often enhances this sense of directness, depicting an expression of near defiance, or an affirmative sense of awareness, a knowing, through his use of the stark subdued depth of his limited color palette. In some of the work, children are looking elsewhere, beyond the frame of the image, rapt in attention to another scene not shown to the audience.

In a set of work including children and uninhabitable buildings in a somewhat barren landscape, there is a deliberate sense of wistfulness, perhaps even depression-era echoes. In one work, two children hold hands but look away from each other, their expressions resigned. Here, black and white figures with a blood-red background. In another, two children are celebrating their candy canes before an old barn-like environment, the color coding reversed, with blood-red figures and a black and white ground.

The two-color system Çakır deploys accentuates the precise elements of his image selection as well as his remarkable drawing technique. And then there is the bee. The oversize bee, a distinctly surreal overtone. Its symbolic value is ambiguous—a stinger, a drone, a swarmer, a honey producer, a pollinator.

"Pollination underpins the web of life, helping crops produce food and helping flowers produce seeds." The bee could have multiple meanings, but at this scale, floating in space, repeated so often, it seems unthreatening, friendly even, and a portent of possibility.

In "I Closed the Door from the Outside," Sefa Çakır offers viewers something rare: an inside look at his concerns and how those concerns are developed and articulated through a careful and precise range of visualizing techniques.

Accentuated not just by the vibrant form of his drawing technique and surfaces, but also by the deliberate selection of his viewpoint in image selection, the decisive, reductive forms and dark, deep colors in the choice of his backgrounds, and the depiction of his subjects—derelict buildings and young figures in various poses: wistful, lyrical, confident, or defiant."