Curator: S. Çağatay Özkefeli
Artists: F. Neriman ŞAİROĞLU
When you look at a canvas, you first see the surface. The layers of paint, the transitions of colors into one another, the trace left by the brush. Yet Neriman Şairoğlu asks you a question at precisely that moment: What lies behind the surface? Over the course of an artistic journey spanning more than thirty years, Şairoğlu transformed the canvas from a mere surface into an archaeological site where memory is excavated and emotion is torn open and laid bare. She tears, scrapes, brings forward, and covers up. Each intervention is an effort to reach the third dimension; a desire to break through the wall. The exhibition Rhythm, Tearing, Silence takes shape around these three concepts. Rhythm lives in the white strokes cast over red and black — that dynamic balance in which the painting breathes in and out. Tearing is both a physical gesture and an inner cry: the rebellion on canvas of the traces left from childhood, of words left unspoken, of a woman raised under an authoritarian hand. Silence, meanwhile, is hidden within works left untitled: a deliberate void offered to the viewer without direction, without imposition. Şairoğlu's palette is no accident: red carries excitement and violence, black carries death and infinity. Together they speak of life's cyclicality — everything rises, transforms, is cleansed, and returns. Each scraping on the canvas is a layer of this cycle: birth and decay, exuberance and calm, remembering and forgetting. The works you will encounter in this exhibition await not only to be seen, but to be felt. The organic forms within the abstract — the wave-like flow of fabric, the roundness and roughness of nature — carry an emotion that flat paint could never convey. In Şairoğlu's own words: "When I paint it flat, it doesn't work. When it's like this, my emotions come through." You are looking at the works of an artist who, through her studio running continuously since 1997, has opened the path for dozens of artists, founded Pura Art Gallery, and examined world art piece by piece on a museum journey stretching from Los Angeles to Paris. Yet the essence of all this accumulated experience fits into three words: authenticity, sincerity, honesty. For her own canvas, and for art itself. Stand before Neriman Şairoğlu's works. Look at the surface, then step behind it. Because those paintings are not trying to show what is visible — they are trying to show what is not.
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