Turkish Artist Volkan Diyaroglu - artmarketblog.com You may have read one of my previous posts praising the work of Turkish born artist Volkan Diyaroglu who has recently been included in the Saatchi Gallery top ten for the third time
way. In another sense, my visible process isn’t really my process, something that I don’t really understand. This process exists for me alone. What one sees from the outside is totally superficially, or at least I think it is, but at the same time, I’m not especially interested that the process becomes visible.
Speak of painting as object, I don’t know why artists are bothered so much that their art is treated as objects, or why we’re talking only about painting and sculpture as objects in the art world. For me, an installation is also one object more, in some ways decorative and thought of in a three dimensional way, or a video, if it wants to be seen also has to have a certain existence as an object the same as a painting. Even ideas, in order to be explained, have to be objects. Letters have to be written, or leave the mouth and mix with air, and sound in space has a form and that too is an object. Otherwise, it would be enough to think it without explaining it to anyone or to communicate with the outside world.
Today, one can consume anything that exists in the world. To say otherwise is a lie. This is totally outside my way of thinking and my studio. A glass, a sofa can be consumed, and the same thing happens with painting after I spend my time with the work, after the process is over and it continues on without me. I spend more or less eight hours a day working and in the process of this time, I change, I close, I open, I have fun, and I get bored. But all this isn’t in order to have something physical. Otherwise I’d do something more useful. Painting in its existence is absurd. All the work is for myself. Painting is the point at which I touch the exterior world and the world touches my inner world, it ties me to it, and liberates me from it.
T.C. Your take on painting as an object ready to be consumed is interesting. Do you believe that painting has survived precisely because of the demand for its decorative qualities, and that explains its omnipresence in most art fairs although the world of art critics and many artists, outside of gallery structure, clearly go for what is called new media art?
V.D. No, I don’t care if that happens. What I want to say, as I said before, the importance that painting has for me precedes all of this, especially when I’m doing it. Of course, beyond this there’s a world with million of stories, millions of movements, million of businesses, all happening beyond my existence and at times we have to talk about that as well. But I don’t believe that painting is any more decorative than, as you say, new media art, and that at this moment they are decorating institutions, buildings, museums, which belong to the government and they are
