The Elephant Dream III Print

I start my painting with automatic drawing, applying paint with brushes and other tools to create a grisaille. At a certain point, some unbidden forms keep emerging from the primeval surface of paint; maybe it is my brain that projects some forms to the surface from the unconscious. Relying on the concept of Freudian Uncanny and others, my paintings seem to reflect the repressed memories of my childhood, especially the indoctrinated techno-utopian dream and its subsequent debacle, as a form of denatured nostalgia. Although I wish I could erase the period from my mind filled with mixed feelings of being awkward, anxious, manipulated, disappointed and yet occasional bittersweet flash memories, I have realized I am incapable of denying its existence or escaping from it because it already became an inseparable part of my identity. Likewise, while I did not want to deal with it again through my paintings, it seems I have failed to reject its return to my paintings from the unconscious. My current paintings, with the forms of denatured nostalgia, embody certain ideas and suggest them through certain themes and modalities such as the themes of circus, the establishment of an implicit viewer’s space and others. In other words, as my paintings become confluent with the anxieties about the current and the future, the ontological conundrum and the ambivalence toward the technology, it is to be a twilight zone where incongruent and even antithetical elements vacillate between: the past and the future: Western European paintings and animations seen during my childhood: the philosophical ideas and the pop-cultural notions: the gestalt and the notational images: the familiar and the unfamiliar: the conscious and the unconscious: the despairing and the hopeful: the nostalgic and the uncanny.