“Painting is One Thing, We Are Another” by Murat Önen

Murat Önen’s first solo exhibition in Turkey remains on view until March 28 at Öktem Aykut in Tepebaşı, Istanbul. Under its original title, painting is one thing; you are another, the exhibition also follows on from the shows the artist held at Galerie Max Mayer in Düsseldorf at the end of 2024 and at Edouard Montassut in Paris in 2025.

In Önen’s first Istanbul exhibition, which brings together mostly unframed, medium-sized paintings, melancholy emerges as a key mood connecting the works. The title of the exhibition itself is based on a line from the lyrics by Fethi Dinçer to the composition Kaderimde Hep Güzeli Aradım by Avni Anıl.

Adding yet another autobiographical detail to the exhibition, the artist leaves behind a childhood self-portrait and a mattress at the back of the gallery. Almost like a bare psychoanalytic session space, this installation, with its unsettling openness, allows the other works in the exhibition to move freely through the gallery.

The Intimate Time of Painting
In Önen’s paintings, the issues strive to remain, to stay alive and hang on both in life and in the gallery, despite an overall sense of unity. Recognizing the image’s existence and the highly fragile task of serving as its spokesperson, Murat Önen continually uses the self-portrait as a costume of identity in his works. The effect of the paintings becomes an ode to those delicate, rare moments when dreams slip away as they are remembered. As absurdity takes on a formal quality, the exhibition celebrates the freedom it derives from this by meeting the viewer eye to eye, while the pastel colors chosen by Önen apply a kind of romantic maturity to the intimate time of painting. This also becomes a notable support for the presence and authenticity of the works.

In the exhibition by the painter, a graduate of the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, Yeşim Akdeniz studio, the viewer moves from one painting to another as if passionately absorbed in a single, slender storybook. The ‘psychedelic’ sincerity in the paintings, in terms of the artist’s level of expression, can summon into the gallery many masters such as Mehmet Güleryüz, Nevhiz, Komet, Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Georges Rouault, Emil Nolde, and Neş’e Erdok.

The Real and the Surreal

The exhibition of Murat Önen, a young painter born in 1993, contains the unrepeatable companionship of those desolate taverns where, the longer one stays, one acquires singular, one-night friendships.

In the paintings of the artist, who left Turkey in 2012, the weight of subconscious compositions shaped under the pressure of nostalgia is, of course, also felt. Murat Önen, who debates on the canvas how far he can reconcile the real and the surreal with a discipline that does not indulge his brush, emphasizes in the exhibition’s press release that he generally works on more than one canvas at the same time.

This attitude also becomes the passport of a precious visual idleness that signals to us that Önen experiences life, existence, and the subconscious simultaneously, that he chooses the canvas as a kind of tavern of his own existence; and that he sits sincerely at all the tables within his soul until the early hours of the morning.

Safeguarding the rational limit of his paintings in favor of their existence with devotion, after a certain point Önen, just like the introductory improvisation of an oud or qanun player, lets himself into the hands of the painting; with almost the estrangement of a viewer, he cares to watch with curiosity and sincerity what happens on the canvas, then to paint together with the painting, to speak and fall silent together, and to listen to the painting.

Image Within Image
For instance, if we accept the artist’s 2025 work, A Little Tired but Brand New, as a spokesperson for the exhibition as a whole, the work offers the viewer a balance that does not set reality and the surreal at odds with one another. With a curiosity about how it can also surpass its own truth, the painting transforms into a passage and sets out to explore how it can assume the depiction of a higher truth. In the work, the bearer/painter/human who removes himself from his bed sips the existential absurdity of a drowsy miracle while contemplating what is real in the face of the colorful moment he witnesses.

Likewise, with a striking sun in a leading role, as if attempting to evoke Aliye Berger’s classic Sunrise, three figures—yet as two separate layers of being—draw us into Two Men and the Yellow Void. The viewer needs to make a certain effort to “enter” these paintings, to “swim” within them and to “dive” into themselves. Yet this very effort also becomes possible when the viewer, by “doing nothing,” leaves themself to this other realm.

“I make use of both Eastern and Western canons like a toolbox. I do not observe a distinction between the abstract and the figurative; instead, I take up the structure of ‘image within image’ and the process of painting itself as my subject so that my work can remain open and experimental,” says Önen—and he does this continually, as in his ‘in-between’ self-portrait titled Good Morning to Myself.

Traces of Life

Just as time and existence may or may not be, a seemingly simple yet substantial question—whether the image, too, might have a before and an after—stands behind you throughout the exhibition with a sense of nothingness (much like the feeling that the paintings are also watching you). As such, the unease of a constant awakening, stirred by your own impatience, becomes the most significant legacy these paintings leave you.

Thus, existence turns into a matter of debts and dues unfolding within the exhibition space. One’s helpless fixation on one’s own life, the (self-)love caught between essence and appearance trying to escape narcissism, and the coercive wrath of choosing between the traces of life and emptiness—all become, in various colors and scales, the formal concerns these paintings are exposed to and collide with the viewer.

These paintings remain silent as if attempting a record underwater until you leave the gallery; yet while you are still in the elevator, they begin, lightly and insistently, to call you—and everyone else, but most of all each other—to account. The works the artist shares with both the viewer and himself like an “image tavern” offer a painful yet unique proposition of confiding in the existential contradictions of both the human and representation.

This confiding, reaching as far as your headphones, continues with the muse-like notes playing on TRT Nağme.

The song, composed by Avni Anıl with lyrics by Fethi Dinçer, comes to you performed by Ferdi Özbeğen:

“I always sought the beautiful in my fate
The instruments within me are one thing, the words another
As my desire comes alive in my imagination
The painting on the wall is one thing, you are another

I pitched a tent in the sky and sat
On earth, life is one thing, the soul another
I too have grown weary of this love
Summer rain and winter rain are altogether different”

Info: https://oktemaykut.com/past-exhibitions/murat-onen-resim-baska-sen-baska