Balkan Naci İslimyeli presents his most recent exhibition, composed of works produced over the past eighteen months, at Pg Art Gallery between 15 January and 28 February 2002. The exhibition brings together thirty works executed in mixed media.
Advocating that art has always united the territories divided by politics, the artist, in this exhibition, integrates the “contrasting” beauties of Anatolia — a geography that has nurtured some of the most significant formations in human history. Values historically defined as “other” within political narratives and layered vertically across time unfold across a horizontal pictorial plane within the artist’s contemporary compositional structure, forming the fragments of a tableau of tolerance.
Archetypal forms, myths, and religions created on these lands are re-produced and interconnected to form unified works. Within this new pictorial plane, Anatolian Seljuk motifs merge with the aesthetics of icons; Ottoman talismanic shirts converge with Byzantine auras; and symbols of Turkish folk painting are brought together with Western iconography. Alongside oil paint, acrylic, and photography, materials such as felt, natural dyes, and copper contribute historical and cultural associations to this timeless synthesis.
Even in his most recent works, Balkan Naci İslimyeli places at the center of his practice the translucent density of temporal layers, which he regards as fundamental building blocks in the formation of contemporary consciousness. Emphasizing that the present moment represents the latest point in individual and collective historical awareness, the artist interprets every creative act as an externalization of this consciousness through diverse means and methods.
In this exhibition — the latest destination of Balkan Naci’s figurative language, suspended between memory and dream in the void of our age — not only the timelessness of art is reflected, but also the tragedy of the creative individual born timelessly into their own era.
