While Green Becomes Estranged To Itself

Reconsidering green independently from the natural environment that it belongs to... Interpreting it as a filling material or a landscape element inside the city... In flowerpots scattered on lamp posts, in ivies planted next to the walls on the side of highways, or in durable but unhappy plants scattered inside concrete blocks separating different lanes... This fantasy landscape created by an alla turca aesthetics has, moreover, another dimension taking form in the construction economy. Symbolic gardens presented as marketing material in housing estates built for the middle class, or winter gardens established on rooftops of super luxury residences in a grove cut by construction machines. All of this is part of a series of green peculiarities of city life. But certainly, variations of peculiarities are not limited to this. Symbolic parks set up inside neighbourhoods or on roadsides, decorative pools presented as landscape designs, artificial cascades and more... These areas taking shape as the closest points of escape inside the concrete jungle, at the same time, form the backbone of hybrid city landscapes.

Reversing, changing, transforming and reinterpreting in her imagination the realities of the city, presented as a summary above, in her tenth solo narrative entitled “Fill in the Plant”, Burcu Perçin presents a critical reading in terms of the possibilites of painting. The circulation of the vegetation as cosmetics in grey areas determining the city and its boundaries forms one of the starting points in the artist’s new series. Not letting go of the irony peculiar to a painter while conveying to her canvas the green sceneries, which contradict themselves and becomes estranged to their essence inside the city, the artist focuses on states of being “as if”, potentially familiar to the audience in each painting that she creates. In this journey concerning the transformation of green inside the city, the artist invites her audience to an unintentional journey while on the canvas she reestablishes spaces belonging to different geographies. Greenhouse images inside the city indicating the geography of England or the Gardens of Marqueyssac in France with a history stretching to centuries meet on a common ground in painting together with sceneries collected from the city that she lives in. In the series mostly consisting of geometric foms with variable dimensions from nature, rendering visible the oil paint sometimes in layers and sometimes by letting it flow upon the canvas, the artist proceeds on a path determined by improvisation and chance in some of her paintings. The series “Fill in the Plant” including six oil paintings of various sizes as well as two works created with oil paint on photography makes room for the marble image, also passionately embraced by Perçin in her previous works, in a different way. Positioned in the middle of artifical green areas, this image includes various connotations from an abstract marble sculpture to a melting glacier. Within the scope of the exhibition, two new paintings - successors of the artist’s series “Mountains Have No Owners” dated 2014 and centering upon detail images from marble quarries - and an abstract relief work consisting of marble pieces cut in different sizes meet the audience. These works, the technical perception of which changes according to the distance and which are perceived as abstract forms at close range but as a whole from a distance, include references from the abstract and partly from the realist painting tradition.

Burcu Perçin is an artist who has made environmental issues into the main theme in her works and reflects upon different final feelings conveyed by nature and city images. In 2007 and in the following three years, she continued her painting adventure - which she began with her solo exhibition in 2005 by painting human figures inside a wild forest and objects abandoned in nature - with a range of themes from highway images to abandoned industrial buildings to their indoor spaces. In 2014 the artist painted the series “Mountains Have No Owners” wherein she illustrated the destruction of nature through the rent struggle in marble quarries, and in the last two years she worked on the series entitled “Fill in the Plant”. In her new series, its English title named with reference to the phrase “Fill in the blanks”, the artist renders visible through the possibilities of painting the troubled relation of modern man to nature. On one part of the canvas the painter mirrors constructed urban realities created by developing economies, while on the other part she sheds light on the lack of green inside the city.

 Sami Kısaoğlu, 2017