FROM ORDINARY REALITIES TO A CONTEMPORARY MYTHOLOGY

“What interests me is the reality whose pain I feel within me and experience in different ways every day.”

With these words, Gülgün Başarır describes the creative impulse behind the works presented in her exhibitions at Millî Reasürans Art Gallery and Nelli Art Gallery. Her paintings evoke a sense of pain that one initially cannot quite identify. They resemble casually taken snapshots of everyday life and appear, in that sense, almost unassuming.

The artist’s “subjects” confront us in highly realistic forms, situated within familiar interior or exterior settings. This sense of familiarity draws the viewer in. Yet, upon closer inspection, one realizes that the reality depicted in these paintings is not the reality we know. It is, rather, the reality that the artist “feels the pain of within herself.”

An open lid, a half-pulled drawer with underwear and socks spilling out; a chair with a shirt or jacket casually draped over its back; a table with a kitchen apron thrown across it. Or a corridor inside a house, empty like a labyrinth; worn parquet floors; a landing and part of a staircase. Or a manhole cover seen from a window; a leafless tree; a car; laundry hanging in front of the window...

These are fragments from a world where darkness prevails, where light is absent or can only filter through faintly. There is no movement. Everything is utterly still, frozen as if nothing will ever move again. Time seems to have stopped, like in a photographic frame. Yet these images differ from photographs. They are unsettling. This is a world without people. In fact, there is not a single living being here, not even a leaf. It is as if all humans and living creatures have suddenly left these scenes.

These paintings are still lifes of a kind. The artist offers no sense of escape from them. For this reason, they feel unsettling—but never frightening. There is a quiet, aching allure to them. This effect stems from Başarır’s ability to contain all these themes within the boundaries of painting and to express them pictorially. She presents the realities around us in an objective yet highly detailed manner. What emerges is a fragmented reality. Yet each fragment possesses, in itself—undoubtedly also in painterly terms—a near-perfect integrity. As a result, even the smallest detail in these paintings is capable of conveying the whole of reality—or of life itself. Viewers find themselves confronting the fundamental problems of contemporary existence, of the relationships one forms with oneself, with others, and with one’s surroundings. In the presence of an utterly ordinary setting, they begin to question both themselves and their time. Ordinary realities, lifeless and frozen objects, suddenly transform into a contemporary mythology that shapes human destiny. And all of this unfolds within the frame of a painting.

Having won third prize in the 1986 Abdi İpekçi Film Criticism Competition and first honorable mention in the 1987 Abdi İpekçi Novel Criticism Competition, Gülgün Başarır graduated from the Painting Department of the Gazi Institute of Education. After many years working as an art teacher and holding eight solo exhibitions, participating in state painting and sculpture exhibitions, and having one of her works acquired by the Istanbul Painting and Sculpture Museum, she is now a retired teacher who devotes all her time to painting.