The Heart's Eye
Date: 9 - 21 November 2020
Place: Rustem Bookstore, Nicosia
Curator: Zehra Şonya
Artist : Günay Güzelgün
About Exhibition
EMU Art Coordinator and Curator The second exhibition mainly includes Günay Güzelgün's pastel and watercolor works. These works, like the first exhibition, mostly consist of the artist's diary, freelance works she painted for herself, experimented with colors, researched and set herself free. This brings up the incompleteness of some of the works and the overload on some of them. Undoubtedly, colors are very important for an artist. As colors are complementary to thought, they are often important in the context of expressing emotions. It can be said that the artist, who preferred pastel and dark tones in her early works, later preferred vivid colors and created her own language in this regard. The colors red, blue, yellow and orange, which she frequently uses, are highlighed in her works. Her passion for the color yellow and its evolution towards different emotions and meanings makes the yellow color a privileged structure. It can be said that in her work, Güzelgün uses color in a dominant and screaming manner and therefore he has a colorist understanding. The artist, who previously applied vivid colors in blocks on flat surfaces, moves towards an impressionist style with fast and disconnected brush strokes, spots and dots in later periods, but also towards an expressive effect due to the intensity of emotion she creates with colors. Although human-centered works are predominant in her patterns, it is observed that this focus is directed towards the environment and nature in her colorful works. Leaving an anthropocentric approach, the artist attempts to come to terms with the environment, life and the universe by focusing on the human being in daily life and nature and the animals accompanying them. The human does not have a privileged structure and importance in her work. She exists in nature and is a part of it like other creatures. The human gains meaning and comes to life with nature and environment in her works. Günay Güzelgün has never adopted a descriptive understanding. In other words, the apparent reality has never been of her interest. She is more concerned with emotions, momentary situations, events and feelings. This situation reveals itself even in the works in which humanity stands out. The characterization of almost caricatured human figures does not come from the depicted faces, but from body language and color-applied areas, patterns and motifs created. In addition to color, we see that the artist is looking for her own reality in the way of creating perspective and composition, in other words, she tries to look inside, looks with her heart rather than with her eyes, and attempts to create it. Especially in her works dealing with nature, qualities such as taking the human who settled in the history of painting with the Renaissance into the center, placing the space according to the eye and optical reality, positioning perspective and objects according to this understanding, three-dimensional perception, light shadow understanding, etc. features are not observed. As we can see in the works of the early period, the arrangements seen in the understanding of miniature, stacking, showing as if viewed from above, using objects large or small according to their importance rather than their actual size, objects gaining identity with color rather than light, handling from different angles, forming different realities on the same plane, etc. are more observed features. In the works she produced in the 2000s, the helozonic structures developed around a center, which made its composition quite interesting, and the houses, animals, mountains and hills settled in these structures, and the fluttering of vivid colors with similar effects make Günay create the features that make her herself by moving away from the seen and known reality. For these reasons, Günay's paintings emerge from a non-compulsive and non-artificial inner structure, a childish and pure world, and a state of emotion and energy ready to explode at any moment. Even though her works do not reveal themselves fully, these features that will be felt by the gazing eye cause us to find a place in Günay's colorful world and to smile most of the time. We can say that life itself is recreated with the eyes of heart in Günay's colorful world and brought to our attention. For those who look and know how to see.
Zehra Şonya
EMU Art Coordinator and Curator
