BARIS GOKTURK
www.barisgokturk.com

born in Ankara, 1982.
lives and works in Brooklyn.

The basis for my work is a multi-layered system of slippage with connections to contemporary culture of power. My large-scale paintings are idiosyncratic (dys) utopian attempts of piecing together obscure, nightmarish narratives based on the deliberately mystified notions in the current political, financial and military climate. Terms as common as Too Big To Fail or as obscure as Synergy Related Head Count Adjustment are used everyday by some in the finance world, for instance, as functional tools with clear meaning, except that under the surface they point out to absurd equations at best, and immoral intentions at worst. One could say the same for catch phrases like Enhanced Interrogation or Extraordinary Rendition in militaristic jingo, and Manifest Destiny and War on Terror in political terminology.
I use these distorted notions as springboard to create abstract systems of figurative narratives by piecing together imagery found on Internet and elsewhere. The continuous flow of slippage starts with these notions that conceal rather than reveal meaning, then moves onto the reference imagery that relates to them only through random image searches and ultimately ends up on pre-modeled, textured, scarred painting ground that can only receive parts of the referenced image because of these obstacles on its surface.
As a result, the paintings are obstructed after-thoughts, projections on a cave wall rather then representations of these verbal misrepresentations. The worn off pictorial zone inhibits several clashes between the meaning stripped off the word, the image stripped of meaning, painting stripped of painting and so on. This way, every aspect of the work becomes paradoxical yet its raison detre becomes meaningful. Consequently, not only the act of seeing but also seeing through, seeing despite of and seeing beyond become indispensable in approaching the work.
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