Life is unpredictable, ambiguous, and misty; it is full of uncertainties. We as humans can only live in the moment, tend to make plans for the near future, we dream yet do not precisely know what will happen next. There are frozen moments in the works of the artist Karyagdi. It resembles a freeze-frame in which the moment the spectator presses the pause button while watching. The artwork invites the beholder to be part of it, to tangle with the depicted figure. The beholder wonders what happened just before this scene and what might happen after. It takes us back to a memory, a feeling we’ve had before. We start imagining and suddenly find ourselves in the place of the figure of the work. What we watch is a scene from our life.
In the works Misty Times exhibition, the figures are humane, always on a quest, and carry traces of our lives. Having losses in their lives with some gains might be a metaphor for the negativity of the world which is obsessed with success. Perhaps being unaware of what they have lost, they also carry vague destruction within them on the rupture between desire and reality. They do not seem to suffer much, life flows on.
In the artist’s recent works, the combination of thick paint layers, the composition formed by the combination of small pieces and the unity of monochrome colors in harmony with each other, the combination of traditional oil painting on canvas and modern Plexi material draws attention. In other words, the sculptures created by plexiglass and transparent paint together seem to be the apple of the eye of the exhibition.
Karyagdi points the images being quickly consumed in daily life to explore the stories behind the individual images he has extracted by abstracting them from any context. He makes us wonder about the source of the anxiety of the imprinted image engraved in the memory. Perhaps “the artist is the one who exhibits the unspeakable.” After all, doesn’t art emerge from our silences?
