İrfan Önürmen’s critical language is primarily formed by the daily superheroes pumped by the system—such as football players, wrestlers, and mafia bosses—along with the lynch attempts in the ready-to-explode ghettos, and characters who are caught by cameras after a night out at bars, whose lives seem to consist entirely of these fleeting moments. These figures are ordinary people who, in the artist’s paintings, take on different roles in everyday life, as Andy Warhol famously said, "famous for fifteen minutes."
With the 1990s, İrfan Önürmen began to decipher a society that had turned into a collage heap, showing the tangled state of individuals who, having lost their identity, are struggling to become someone else but can never truly be the “other.” He dissects the structural order of the whole in which this tragedy unfolds.
The artist does not turn these character types into objects of exploitation, nor does he attempt to create a new world by stealing from their lives. The collage structures he creates contain the bitter taste of disarray, corruption, pollution, and absurdity scattered around them.
