Following its presentation at Galeri Işık Teşvikiye, Yonca Saraçoğlu’s new exhibition Untold Tales is now at Istanbul Concept Gallery in Beyoğlu. Bringing together the artist’s oil paintings from her new productions with selected works from her sculptural practice, the exhibition’s second stop also features eight additional works from the same series.
Having worked with a wide color palette in previous periods, Saraçoğlu develops in Untold Tales a narrative directed toward memory through misty images achieved with fewer colors. This new field of expression, constructed through her focus on specific colors, constitutes one of the most striking aspects of the exhibition. Untold Tales, which brings together Saraçoğlu’s paintings and sculptures in this unity for the first time, invites the viewer into a layered narrative space.
In Pursuit of the Unspoken and the Silent…
In Untold Tales, Yonca Saraçoğlu says that she pursues what is lost in translation, what cannot be articulated, the unspoken and the silent: “I traced meanings that have lost their place and subject, what cannot be confessed, what has no equivalent in language, silent catastrophes, the void, losses, what is not deemed worthy of being told, what sounds like a tale to the other,” she says, adding: “As a ‘lone wanderer,’ I wandered, losing myself in the misty, hazy, uncertain, dreamlike atmosphere of a blue-green harmony accompanied by yellow and purple, asking unintended questions to the shadows I encountered in the labyrinths I roamed. I found what I was not looking for; what I could not find, I am still searching for…”
Istanbul Concept Gallery founder Işık Gençoğlu, on the other hand, emphasizes that Untold Tales does not arise from the absence of untold stories, but from their resistance to being consumed, offering a narrative that is as silent as it is powerful, and as simple as it is profound.
The Color of Freedom and Pain: Blue
Feyyaz Yaman, founder of Karşı Sanat and a critic and theorist, states in his text written for the Untold Tales catalogue that Saraçoğlu’s recent works can be defined as a “Blue Period,” and says: “When we look back, we can understand that the previous sculpture exhibition was in fact the first phase of this blue transformation. Or rather, this is not a period, but ‘another world.’ A world in which we calm down in the face of the power of softness felt with the agility of a stingray’s silent flapping, drifting like shadows.”
Stating that Saraçoğlu’s recent works can be described as a “Blue Period,” Yaman expresses the spirit of the exhibition with the following words: “In fact, this is not a period, but ‘another world.’ People and cities, in this cosmic world, find peace in the acceptance of a new reality. At the threshold of a door, in an arched passage, within labyrinthine universes, hope opens up and the world becomes bearable.”
Regarding the associations of the color blue in Saraçoğlu’s work, Yaman notes:
“Blue once had no name. It is not mentioned in the Ancient Greek Pantheon. There is only a system of darks and lights. Rome encountered ‘Blu’ on the face masks of barbarians, in the Arabs’ ‘Azur.’ Its transition from black to the representation of harmony and tranquility begins with the bluing of the Virgin Mary’s veil. However, it only enters the warm–cool scale after Goethe’s color wheel. Before that, it does not even exist in the rainbow. It can only be an edge of nature’s green. As red turns purplish, its closest color is brown, not blue. It comes into fashion with the tears of Young Werther and becomes the most favored color of the 19th century. It is a symbol of ‘freedom’ in the French Revolution, but in Yonca’s palette it represents pain as much as freedom. It is the color of the courage to create, to which we cling against the pain of the world we have lost and the mourning that cannot be held. (…) People and cities, in this cosmic world, find peace in the acceptance of a new reality. At the threshold of a door, in an arched passage, within labyrinthine universes, hope opens up and the world becomes bearable.”
The exhibition Untold Tales continues at Istanbul Concept Gallery until April 11.
