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
a person with little experience in art can have some understanding of it?
V.D. Each individual is completely free to think and feel as they wish when contemplating my work, although they never will understand it all, but neither does that doesn’t matter much to me. It may not seem that way, but I think that my paintings move and change in form continuously, they have many different faces, and when you believe you understand something, that’s just when you don’t understand anything. I’m only asking people for a bit of humour, nothing else. Maybe you have to close your eyes in front of my work, and look at it like that.
T.C. Continuing with questions inherent to your work, do you think that your painting is filled with symbolism, with elements that substitute in part concepts or questions beyond what is represented?
V.D. I myself am a spectator and when I look at my paintings, I think that the whole work is a question and there are many questions within my paintings that don’t have answers. Maybe I’m wrong. When there’s an answer, life is over. I believe that when I paint, I’m not painting. What does the act of painting consist of, in the end? I believe that concepts don’t exist in human life, we make them exist, give them form and a name, we attach the concept with a label and we give them a force, but at the same time we take away a part of their own existence. When we look at something, depending on our point of view, we may find something beyond what’s represented, or not. That’s something about ourselves, not something in the work, or in the objects or things that we believe exist. What I know is I don’t lie when working on a canvas, and this attitude doesn’t permit me to understand my paintings, what more can I say, my painting represents all that has happened, all that will happen, all that can or could happen in the moment that it is created and in the space that it is create.
T. C. I’m struck by your statement that Volkan is a spectator in front of his paintings. Don’t you think that maybe we’re still asking too many questions about what a painting wants to say and are reductive about the explanations, usually absurd in the way a work is interpreted, in order to give it a didactic meaning and especially a historical one, reducing it to a level of absurdity, or trivial questions when what is happening is an enormous gulf disassociation between the spectator and contemporary art.
V.D. Yes, I agree with you. When I say that I myself am a spectator of my own paintings, I want to say that after the completion of an work, I am at the same distance from it than any other spectator, and certainly I’m a poor spectator. Of course we ask too many questions. A work doesn’t have to say
