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
or relate anything. I think that that’s a problem in contemporary life. Society wants to answer all the questions that come up and we think that we have answers to everything, and that everything is in the place it should be, without any problems. Especially in European culture where there’s a tendency to reason and to have answers. There’s not enough mysticism, not enough humour to look outside one’s own self, and at the same, within oneself. European culture, which is the culture that decides history, should be more self-critical. European culture has always wanted, within its own sadness, to create its own legend because it fears of losing itself in time, and thus cultural imperialism begins. I think that everything stems from this problem of a closed rationalization. The same occurs in contemporary art. I think that, outside of the art work itself; we’re all absurd spectators of our own existence. Another factor is the boredom of contemporary, especially European, life. I believe that today more than ever, contemporary art needs spectators more than ever. This is clearly seen. Everyone wants to explain something and understand something that doesn’t exist. I think that soon there’ll be more curators, commissioners, and art critics than there are artists.
T. C. In my opinion it is true that Western culture lacks self-criticism, and in all areas, not just in artistic matters. But focusing on your work, what is certain is that the references that you work with are clearly Western, the overall form, the dripping technique, and even part of the symbolism and the composition of your canvases, all have obvious precedents in the Western art of the second half of the twentieth century. Is your painting a sort of mix of the Western and Eastern with a language that incorporates elements of both cultures?
V.D. Good question. I said before that the West is the one that chooses the lineage of the history of art, the one that writes the history of world art, and on top of that, commercializes it. The overall form that your refer to is already in the history of Islamic art, it’s always been there, while we and the West never have wanted to see it while the east never has wanted to name it. On the wall of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul , we can see what in reality is an overall. In the end, it was the Americans and their abstract expressionism that named it to define pictures which covered the totality of the space without a central element or composition to the work. Abstract painting also has been present in the history of Eastern art and especially in Islamic art. We all know that the representation of the figure is forbidden. But the West since the Greeks started to conceptualize and at the same time materialize human life. For this reason when I look at a Pollock I see someone totally influenced by Islamic art. I don’t know if Pollock was conscious
