The Underside and Upside of the Visible

Maybe the critique is to try to capture what pervaded the life of the artist, and the critic, the creator who transformed the artist into his/her art object. Certainly under the subjective image of the critique is to use the analysis methods but not to be obsessed with the circumscribed structures of the methods. This may be compared with the buildup of a given artist related to the art history and different ways of expression.

If is important to find out the components of the personality of an artist and to deal with his/her interaction with his/her environment in terms of understanding what the artist produced. When, excluding these points, we reduce understanding the works of art to a methodological question, maybe we only get some suppositions as to the place of the work of art and its probable range of meaning. The artist and his/her work, however, are worlds which cannot be analyzed via a method. Understanding them in such a complex and incomprehensible way, should we give up speaking of the artists and the works of art? World and life are also complex but we always speak of them. Because it is the reality which we cannot escape from and we have to understand. In a shared world the people of art should try to understand each other via writing and speaking.

The paintings of Mehmet Ali drew my attention with one of his works in 2001 State Painting and Sculpture Exhibition. In his work with a few black and white printed symbolic figures on an abstract background surface composed of color strips, I found the structural suggestion, tension and the effect reflecting from this tension interesting. The combination of these two different structures with a postmodern manner had created a new structure including rather discursively interesting meanings. As it were, two inharmonious worlds were obliged to carry each other and had no choice but to form a harmony. I think it was somewhat similar to us. Even if we cannot find essential association as to the place where we are, we have to be there.

I was acquainted with Mehmet Ali Doğan a few years ago. We pursued something together. We attended fairs together. We conversed and discussed for long hours. We looked around. We looked at the world and at our environment. The distance between İzmir and Ankara could not prevent the sharing to get deeper. In this short while I tried to know him always with two different structures: Human and the artist. Mehmet Ali is an Anatolian man working madly hard and attaching an equal importance to his artistic creations. A man, a friend who internalized the soils where he was born and grew up and the human beings and the values of those place.

Figure has an important place in the first paintings of Mehmet Ali. This is somewhat because of the model works made in school environment. We follow a search in these works, a search realizing the formation possibilities in a traditionalist line. Dancing women bodies are bent as a result of the subject topic selected but in fat this arises from Mehmet Ali’s desire to express the rhythm he sensed. The motion and rhythm has an important place in his paintings. Virtually everything he wanted to express is associated to these two concepts. Maybe this is somewhat an attempt to capture the music in the painting. In the woman figures, the analyzing studies give way to absolute motion and are transformed into rhythmic lines. These strips, which are the common fictive element of all paintings in the background surface, also assume a common form directing the composition of the painting and determining the main structure. We come fact to face with a substructure, a painting surface which evokes sometimes “Constructivist”, sometimes “Post-Artist Abstraction” and maybe which resembles a contemporary Mondrian of today’s world where the complicity got more and more deep. This surface, which can be a painting in itself, assumes the duty of a fictive space wherein familiar symbols are located. Thus, in the hundreds meters of paintings he applied on the walls of Anatolia Show Center, the strips are perceived both as the space and the objects in the space. This, in terms of the metaphor created, brings a semantic dimension in the works as well as providing the artist with great prospects for solving the structural problems.

The common substructure composed by the strips in different forms evokes the color eboshs in the traditional painting. This provides the artist with great facilities in formation according to the white surface. Both the surface is saturated to moist and a common value to forge links between the new surfaces to be located on the upside is obtained. Mehmet Ali, here, makes us think that he constantly replaced his form as a common value with new prospects and he tried to form new meanings between the “Anatolian Goddesses”, which he helped us to know them, and today’s world. You can see that the color strips below a city view or an antique sculpture are transformed into a woman’s foot or body with a kind of weaving technique. The Anatolian goddesses, as it were, with their views hidden in the background excluded from their cultural contexts, are implying a world from which the artist is trying to distance and with which he is trying to reckon with.

Women… Everything is with them but, to the artist, the images of the daily life are more important. This is an escape, perhaps. Because, though suppressed, they are seen in the inside of all images. This is to make the images overlapped by the artist making use of the photograph transparent with the date of subconscious. The artist, seeking to hide himself with recognizable images, also seeks to reveal with a voluntary activity.

Thereby, the art of Mehmet Ali should be analyzed by dealing with two different layers. According to us, Mehmet Ali and his art are in the forms on the background, which forms embrace the canvas, so as to constitute different meanings. The artist seeks to conceive himself and the audience as the objects or beings of various inharmonious spaces and to compromise them with a structure which we will not find odd in the least even in the most improbable probability. It is seen that, the artist, as it is, seeks to compromise the subconscious and the world where he lives in. This is somewhat an attempt to get the artist and the audience together in a common meaning. The themes in Mehmet Ali’s paintings, “Woman and the Stripped Spaces”, “Transposed”, “Anatolian Civilizations and Variations”, “Siam Serial”, “Earth Sky Sea”, “Kastamonu”, all these topics can become subject topics of a long chronological study. According to us, what should be underscored setting off Mehmet Ali’s paintings, is following: Those who considers the works of art as just subjects and re-demonstration of familiar images and those who have no ground for demonstrating those images have nothing to do with the art. What is at stake here are some other concerns. Mehmet Ali, with his different technical applications, moves forward without being trapped in the aimless re-demonstration of the already seen world.

Bedri KARAYAĞMURLAR

İzmir   2007