Nuri Kuzucan: Passage

Curator: Nilüfer Şaşmazer

Nuri Kuzucan’s solo exhibition Passage brings together a selection of the artist’s earlier works and new productions within a site-specific architectural setting. The exhibition centres on both cognitive and perceptual fluidity and transitivity by featuring works that revolve around dualities such as chaos/order, light/shadow, emptiness/fullness, surface/depth, and interior/exterior. Taking place on Arter’s 1st-floor gallery, Passage creates associations between the transitional space the exhibition resides in and the pictorial space through the architectural, literary, and metaphorical connotations of the word ‘passage’.

Passage invites visitors to explore the paintings and the space from multiple standpoints by referring to their past experiences and activating their imaginations; rather than works that guarantee a fixed and singular experience, it offers a myriad of images that keep reinventing themselves while aiming for each work to interact with the space and highlight one another, instead of merely being viewed from the static locations where they are hung. Thus, the exhibition reimagines the whole space as a pictorial composition and facilitates a distinctive experience of a ‘painting-space’ or ‘spatial painting’ in which visitors can navigate. The intricately woven spatial design and the lighting delicately tuned to suit it also contribute to this experience by heralding new ways of looking and seeing.

In his artistic practice spanning more than twenty years, space has always been a focal point for Kuzucan whose initial works featured multi-coloured interiors, evolving to depictions of streets and urban landscapes, to bird’s-eye renderings of the city, and finally, monochrome architectural structures that fragment into abstraction. The artist’s most recent paintings integrate fundamental architectural elements with primal geometrical forms and offer a wealth of abstract associations as studies of space and open works.