Barış Cihanoğlu | Selected Bio Texts
2020 - 2019 - 2018 /17
2016 /15 - 2014 - 2013
Indivisible Separation
What is sorrow ? Or melancholy ? Is it a secretion that makes people calm and contemplative ? Is it too much secretion of enzymes by the black bile? Or is it the longing for the homeland, that relapses as the distances increase ? The Black Sensation...
The absent-minded angel in Dürer’s famous Melencolia gravure. Has no energy to move its wings. Everything is frozen, time is hung between the objects signifying modernism. The silky smooth civilization process had encountered a “sudden” interruption. The angel looks absent-minded; appears that everything is left behind. As if Dürer foresaw that melancholy could transform to our modern prosthesis, resistance sense. Unknown effect of Saturn. Melancholy has been an interface that keeps our link with the past alive. In a fast world where everything changes rapidly, it is like a slowing breathing moment. Life is standing before us with all its fullness and contradictions. Memories, accumulated time, experiences. Enwrapping, hurting sorrow and melancholy are together. A humane breathing moment, slowing and filling up with time. Barış Cihanoğlu’s paintings have always aroused such feelings in me.
In his paintings, Barış continues “shifts” and exceptional “pull-outs” that we’re witnessing recently in his recently produced works. The figures being pulled out to a direction just from their heads, signifies the internal changes of the being with the passing time. When defining the deformations in his paintings, the artist with his own words say; “In the base notion of deformations added to my paintings recently that I especially apply in portraits, there is the deformation and “pull-outs” symbolizing the change in us and the flow to another direction. Heraclitus said “everything flows, nothing is permanent, therefore it is impossible to swim in the same river twice; because when I enter the river once more both me and the river change”. In my paintings, the figures are not the same people anymore, through the mental change they had in time and they are now being “pulled out” to another person from their previous identity and location. I especially express this pulling out with the shifts in portraits, because it is a matter of pulling out and change lived in our minds.
Cihanoğlu pictured two women sharing the same fate as drawn to each other from their heads in his painting named “Second Wife” in his new exhibition. As a twist of fate, an obligatory gathering is seen here because here is a forced gathering, obligatory, but where are we being pulled from? Or fired? In the brush strokes on the face in Barış’s paintings, we feel both being pulled and pushed at the same time. What is this transparent bond flowing from faces to faces? Not being able to break away and separate, or ruthlessly being pulled away from our bodies. The paint eyes that look at us that we meet in the paintings are almost making us a call for a stop. An intense pause. The painter paints stares getting longer, separating or that don’t want to separate.
Like old photographs attached near a mirror, the figures are like a symphony of looks attached to life. There are faces that get so thin like it’ll break, and then get thicker again. There are tales of heavy and creeping lives as they are fragile. The painter cares for painting families, core families, ideologies, policies and the home for happiness.
The artist is known for figurative paintings. But in his last exhibition he seems to have changed it radically because in his new exhibition named “ASH”, he’s facing the audience with materials other than the canvas itself for the first time.
In his new exhibition for which he has established the infrastructure, we’re seeing Cihanoğlu canvas paintings and carved wooden sculptures and paintings on wood. In his latest performances that he created with an extraordinarily special technique, he’s making pictures on wood’s burnt and carbonized structure. Dark areas in the paintings are formed of natural smoky black caused with carbonization of burnt woo and the other colorful parts are formed with oil painting technique. His works produced through six different phases have been completed after a year of labor. In the artist’s new exhibition, there are a few canvas paintings, twenty five wooden paintings varying in size from twenty five centimeters to two meters, and two wooden carved sculptures.
Friedrich Nietzsche says ; ‘’You have to be ready to burn in your own flames, how can you renew yourself before turning into ash’’. Rebirth like the Phoenix. With the colorful oil paintings he performs on burnt wood, partially turned to ash as a result of burning, he refers to the process of re-existence from the ashes, and the ashes remaining from burnt wood is, the gray manure of rebirth...
Barış Cihanoğlu keeps surprising that he produces with courage. And invites the audience to be a partner of his works with his new solo exhibition named “ASH” that will be opened in mid-October...
What is sorrow ? Or melancholy ? Is it a secretion that makes people calm and contemplative ? Is it too much secretion of enzymes by the black bile? Or is it the longing for the homeland, that relapses as the distances increase ? The Black Sensation...
The absent-minded angel in Dürer’s famous Melencolia gravure. Has no energy to move its wings. Everything is frozen, time is hung between the objects signifying modernism. The silky smooth civilization process had encountered a “sudden” interruption. The angel looks absent-minded; appears that everything is left behind. As if Dürer foresaw that melancholy could transform to our modern prosthesis, resistance sense. Unknown effect of Saturn. Melancholy has been an interface that keeps our link with the past alive. In a fast world where everything changes rapidly, it is like a slowing breathing moment. Life is standing before us with all its fullness and contradictions. Memories, accumulated time, experiences. Enwrapping, hurting sorrow and melancholy are together. A humane breathing moment, slowing and filling up with time. Barış Cihanoğlu’s paintings have always aroused such feelings in me.
In his paintings, Barış continues “shifts” and exceptional “pull-outs” that we’re witnessing recently in his recently produced works. The figures being pulled out to a direction just from their heads, signifies the internal changes of the being with the passing time. When defining the deformations in his paintings, the artist with his own words say; “In the base notion of deformations added to my paintings recently that I especially apply in portraits, there is the deformation and “pull-outs” symbolizing the change in us and the flow to another direction. Heraclitus said “everything flows, nothing is permanent, therefore it is impossible to swim in the same river twice; because when I enter the river once more both me and the river change”. In my paintings, the figures are not the same people anymore, through the mental change they had in time and they are now being “pulled out” to another person from their previous identity and location. I especially express this pulling out with the shifts in portraits, because it is a matter of pulling out and change lived in our minds.
Cihanoğlu pictured two women sharing the same fate as drawn to each other from their heads in his painting named “Second Wife” in his new exhibition. As a twist of fate, an obligatory gathering is seen here because here is a forced gathering, obligatory, but where are we being pulled from? Or fired? In the brush strokes on the face in Barış’s paintings, we feel both being pulled and pushed at the same time. What is this transparent bond flowing from faces to faces? Not being able to break away and separate, or ruthlessly being pulled away from our bodies. The paint eyes that look at us that we meet in the paintings are almost making us a call for a stop. An intense pause. The painter paints stares getting longer, separating or that don’t want to separate.
Like old photographs attached near a mirror, the figures are like a symphony of looks attached to life. There are faces that get so thin like it’ll break, and then get thicker again. There are tales of heavy and creeping lives as they are fragile. The painter cares for painting families, core families, ideologies, policies and the home for happiness.
The artist is known for figurative paintings. But in his last exhibition he seems to have changed it radically because in his new exhibition named “ASH”, he’s facing the audience with materials other than the canvas itself for the first time.
In his new exhibition for which he has established the infrastructure, we’re seeing Cihanoğlu canvas paintings and carved wooden sculptures and paintings on wood. In his latest performances that he created with an extraordinarily special technique, he’s making pictures on wood’s burnt and carbonized structure. Dark areas in the paintings are formed of natural smoky black caused with carbonization of burnt woo and the other colorful parts are formed with oil painting technique. His works produced through six different phases have been completed after a year of labor. In the artist’s new exhibition, there are a few canvas paintings, twenty five wooden paintings varying in size from twenty five centimeters to two meters, and two wooden carved sculptures.
Friedrich Nietzsche says ; ‘’You have to be ready to burn in your own flames, how can you renew yourself before turning into ash’’. Rebirth like the Phoenix. With the colorful oil paintings he performs on burnt wood, partially turned to ash as a result of burning, he refers to the process of re-existence from the ashes, and the ashes remaining from burnt wood is, the gray manure of rebirth...
Barış Cihanoğlu keeps surprising that he produces with courage. And invites the audience to be a partner of his works with his new solo exhibition named “ASH” that will be opened in mid-October...