Mehmet Güreli's exhibition "From Alope's Perspective" can be viewed at the Millî Reasürans Art Gallery from March 11th to April 3rd.

Known as a film director, musician, short story writer, journalist, publisher, caricaturist, and bookstore manager, Güreli is a "young" painter. The paintings, the product of two years of excitement and joy, initially seen by close friends and later seen on book covers, are being exhibited for the first time at the Millî Reasürans Art Gallery.

Mehmet Güreli reveals a previously unknown side of himself and introduces art lovers to his paintings. Mehmet Güreli's artistic background dates back only two years. He began drawing with caricatures. Later, he drew. Mehmet Güreli had no formal art training. However, he considers painting a reflection of a legacy: "Painting carries within itself the deposits of the past, the future, and even the present, where the brushes meet the canvas. Even if the image has appeared to me before, it is the moment it appears to you that initiates the magic. This is such a feeling that, perhaps rather than something acquired or learned as is commonly thought, it announces that it is a pure extension of life itself. For Mehmet Güreli, the relationship established between the painting and the painter at the moment the brush meets the canvas is "not something that can be explained or described." This communication is "more like a state of mind. And as everyone carries their own state of mind, their mind, and their emotions to the point where they find themselves, as they embark on their own synthesis, they find and lose what best suits them. But searching for what they have found once is more meaningful. Yet, the most terrifying thing is not realizing what they have lost."

Mehmet Güreli explains his relationship with painting with Paul Cezanne's words, "Painting is not a profession, but a destiny." "Every time I went to Europe, I would follow a painter. I would buy all his books and reproductions of his paintings I could find. I would look for him in museums. I couldn’t make sense of it for a long time. Turns out it was for these days.” He loved painting with these painters and tried to understand it. But one day, when he picked up the brush, what emerged was not a copy or an imitator, but his own painting. Mehmet Güreli’s paintings are like “a pure extension of life” or testimony to “the artist being himself.” Familiar and unfamiliar faces, mysterious-looking, maybe sad, maybe sarcastic, but beautiful and attractive, thin-necked, foggy women, appear on the canvases like film stills or images that appear and then disappear from the windows of a passing train, but that will perhaps never disappear in the mind. “How unaware of each other, absent-minded, scattered and disordered thoughts and objects seem. Yet, it's as if they're waiting with good intentions." All these paintings seem laden with traces of the artist's past and present. Even so, that "magical moment" begins when the viewer encounters the woman, men, and painter watching them in the paintings. And the paintings act as a mirror directed at the viewer.