Galeri Nev is hosting Onur Kılıç’s new exhibition titled “The Distant of Now”. The layered notion of time does not merely shape the exhibition's thematic framework, but also forms its technical backbone. This notion gains additional significance as the gallery space on Kırlangıç Street marks its eighth anniversary.
While describing the works in the exhibition, Kılıç refers to the concept of the palimpsest. A palimpsest is a manuscript produced in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when parchment was an expensive material, by scraping or erasing the text on parchment so that the same surface could be repeatedly reused. The earlier text or texts are therefore never completely erased; their traces always remain underneath. Sometimes legible, sometimes not.
With “The Distant of Now,” Onur Kılıç does not fix painting to a single moment; instead, he wears it down by eroding it against time itself. What remains is an interweaving of what paint and memory have erased. As is characteristic in Kılıç’s work, copies of art-historical images are also drawn into this process; they too are eroded, distorted, worn away and rendered unrecognizable. Thus, the painting ceases to be a final, completed result and instead, becomes a vessel of traces and erosions. Poetically, it loses its clarity and gives way to the fragility of the moment. In short, “The Distant of Now” takes its name from images that grow more distant from time the closer they come to touching it.
Galeri Nev invites viewers to Kırlangıç Street between January 31 and February 28 to wander among “The Distant of Now.”
