“DA-SEİN” ①

The art of painting is an art based on reflecting passions, feelings and ideas on a two dimentional plane within a frame of certain esthetic rules. In painting the feeling of dimentions, space, the effects of motiont and light are obtained with such elements as form, lines, çolor, differences in shades and texture etc. The combination of color and images can carry symbolic or descriptive meaning in a contextual sense.

The art of graphics on the other hand, creates a new form of communication using pictures, photographs and typography in the same medium. Graphics is the name given to all arts that produce visual imagery using mechanic or semi-mechanic techniques and can not be considered outside the art of printing.

From Lascaux to the tablets of Uruk, from hieroglyphs to gilded manuscripts on parchment paper, there has been endless ways to submit messages via pictures, signs or depictions. Works of art are the most important ways of submitting messages with their pluralism on the usage of material and words. Paul Klee’s idea is proven by the existence of graffiti: “Writing and drawing are on the basics, the same thing.”

As a point where far ends meet, the unity of “graphic art and graphic design” is established by our perception of text and visuals as a whole. Graphic design is a tool of communication where we read by “seeing”, where we heave read as we have “seen.”

When Klee claimed that art is a journey, he tried to hint that art is not just the finished piece, but the process of production as a whole. A process defined not by the goal of the journey, not by the direction of it, but defined by being the fact of being-on-the-road itself. It is a journey made up of notions like experience, life and conditions and a journey itself being a work of art. In the 19th century, with the invention of photography the social role of painting diminished. After the 1920-30’s, art almost lost its way and lots of artists repeated themselves not being able to find their own language in the footprints of artistic currents founded fifty years ago. It is obvious for artists that do not investigate the whys, the essence and the hows of their work could not possibly pave their own ways.

Every artist who has been seeking to produce pieces outside the phenomenon of “objects of spectacle” faces an ontological problem. The art of our century has to exist with its “conceptual background”. Not being able to catch the essence of the century pulls art to the area of being an article for the market. It could be said that those pieces which strive to produce a visual effect tend to interact easily with the audience, but being “an object of spectacle” should not lead to not having a conceptual background.

When you consider the works of Ayşegül İzer as a whole, including “Point of Spring” and “Projections” realized in İstanbul, “Erennerungen” in Germany and “Invisible Cities” and “2 in 1” in Canada, they can be related to each other as a whole with a meaning and in a certain system. This bond is established by the usage of “space, element and material usage having a sense of width” and “iconographic” narration found in the interior and exteriors of tpe works.

For Ayşegül İzer, to plan a painting is not unlike to plan a city, she wants the audience to stroll around the layers of the piece she has installed. She, the artist, gets to be more excited when someone wonders the reason of all those elements being combined more than someone just admiring the harmony of colors.

Abstract concepts found in İzer’s works are handled as geometrical relationships. The layers in her paintings; circles, elipces, squares, triangles, curves like hyberboles and paraboles, cross sections, all find themselves a place as a coordinate if a system consisted of n points can be handled in a n dimentioned point in space.

In her paintings, we can talk about sub levels determined by lineer equation sets which relate different coordinates with each other or sub spaces. Topology②, the newest and most complicated branch of geometry find itself a place in her works because of this reason. Topology has close relationships with symbolic logic. All “elements inter time, space and objects” used in her works, coordinates, colors, pictograms, numbers, letters, maps, architectural forms, mathematics, typography, drawings and even kinds of concepts and elements which do not fit into geometry, finding a place in her works, do not care to protect their own autonomies, they in fact lose their autonomies and reach their goals as they get decoded by the masses.

In this context, the way the work are exhibited is as important as the works themselves. Installation has to have a sound order. Because there is a connection between the first and the last piece, ample time has to be given to the watcher to follow the communication.

The process of creation consists of internalization of the starting point and reacting to it by a power of intuition. For the artist not to take his/her perception and use it as it is, he/she must internalize the starting point. One should not be afraid of controlled change and bringing in a creative interpretation without changing the basic structure. If not, self repetition is inevitable.

For me, “a work of art is much beyond hailing everybody, it is an area that belongs to the artist’s his/herself.”

① Da-sein : is a concept forged by Martin Heidegger in his magnum opus Being and Time. It is derived from da-sein, which literally means being-there/here, though Heidegger was adamant that this was an inappropriate translation of Dasein. Dasein is synonymous with existence. Heidegger used the concept of Dasein to uncover the primal nature of "Being" (Sein) which Descartes and Kant left unexplored. Like Nietzsche, Heidegger criticized the notion of substance, arguing that Dasein is always a being engaged in the world. The fundamental mode of being is not that of a subject or of the objective but of the coherence of being-in-the-world.
②Topology : (Greek topos, "place," and logos, "study") is a branch of mathematics that is an extension of geometry. Topology begins with a consideration of the nature of space, investigating both its fine structure and its global structure.