PARACETAMOL
Versus Art Project, ISTANBUL
10.01 - 23.02.2019
Versus Art Project, is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of artist SABO, titled Paracetamol between 10.01 – 23.02.2019.
Taking its name from one of the artist's early childhood experiences, the exhibition takes a look into the role time plays in the transformation of image in one's memory.
Starting off with the images traced in his mind from early childhood memories, the artist combines his experiences with these images in his subconscious. Various compositions appear as a result, each open to the spectator’s own interpretation. SABO opens the doors to a new world where he applies graphic elements through painterly language, with a humorous tone.
The oil compositions in the exhibition, which allude to reality, but carry fictional elements, seem to be much like the very unsettling feeling one feels the moment when he wakes up from a strange dream. SABO’s paintings carry fantastical, fictional, story-like traits.
Although figures play a prominent role in the work of the artist, the space and its surrounding elements contribute to the narrative as much as the figures do.
The work of SABO is fantastical and fictional; the audience is first invited into the storyline by the figures, and throughout the journey, the spectator follows a path complemented by detailed spaces and objects. This journey is anything but single dimensional as it feeds off of the spectator’s own imagination, and creates alternative storylines accordingly. Thus, the initial narrative created by the artist becomes richer in time.
Art, although seen as a form of expression of creativity with a bit of aesthetic concern, is also one of the tools one uses to solidify and visualize the images and experiences embedded in one’s memory from early childhood. Humans have a tendency to remember traumatic events in their past different than how they actually occurred. Whether it be a natural hazard, an illness, a loss, or some of the happiest moments they have experienced, all memories are masked with a thin veil up to a point, and all the emotions felt at an extremity are then neutralized. Reality and experience becomes intertwined, and hybrid images are born.
SABO presents the spectator with a new universe with these hybrid images. Everything the artist has experienced, specific pages from books he has read, scenes from movies that have been traced into his subconscious, are all instances where the spectator may find a piece of themselves as well. All of the compositions in the exhibition, which allude to reality, but carry fictional elements, seem to be the much like the very unsettling feeling one feels the moment when he wakes up from a strange dream. This dream, under the effects of Paracetamol, always comes to a close, with unexpected turns.
İdil Deniz Türkmen
