ceren oykut

The Centre d’art Madeleine Lambert Vénissieux presents the first solo exhibition in France by Berlin-based artist Ceren Oykut.  

Ceren Oykut’s expressive drawings are made on a variety of supports, in all sizes, from minuscule pieces of paper to large-scale formats. For the present exhibition, Oykut places delicate, fragmentary drawings on cut-out transparent supports, arranged on a plain wooden table that resembles a workbench. Preceding spaces in the exhibition feature work displayed to the full height of the gallery walls. Her highly detailed, busy scenes also unfold in three dimensions: line drawings are released from the paper support, to extend across walls and become autonomous forms in their own right, suspended in mid-air. 

Delicate, spectral figures are cut from sheet metal, using a blowtorch, and hung from the ceiling, to form mobiles whose silhouettes tinkle gently as they knock together like a ring of bells. Turning slowly with the movement of the air, their free-floating shadows are projected onto the surrounding walls. 

Inspired by prehistoric cave paintings, Ceren Oykut plays with surfaces that capture and shape the lines and shadows of her work, and with stage lighting which she uses to immerse the visitor in semi-darkness. 

Ensemble I,II and III, Ink, graphite and charcoal on paper, 150×180 cm, 150×225 cm and 150×230 cm, Video installation 00:55, 2023

Oykut is fascinated by the origins of art. She has made a study of prehistoric rock art, and was profoundly influenced by the Chauvet cave¹ in France, which she visited during preparations for her exhibition at Vénissieux. This source of inspiration, acknowledged by the artist, suggests another: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, in which shadows are taken for real objects, though they offer only a partial, distorted vision of the world. This world of shadows is a world of deceptive appearances that invite us to doubt, and seek meanings beyond, the (false) evidence of our own eyes. Throughout the exhibition, we encounter a host of drawn figures, objects and buildings: a fragmentary world of small scenes and cumulative impressions. Some depict clearly recognisable subjects, but many others assume free, abstract forms which we struggle to identify. It falls to the viewer to spot equivalents and similarities, to put a name to the things we see, or to accept the unknown – to accept the persistent otherness of figures which remain mysterious and elude our attempts at interpretation.

Often the drawings seem to take on a life of their own, even to act of their own volition, driven by motives that remain unclear. What we do see clearly,  all around us, is life itself – teeming with activity, fascinating and, to all appearances, chaotic. This accumulation of small tableaux and brief scenes, peopled with numerous figures in diverse, improbable situations, is reminiscent of the works of Hieronymus Bosch²  or the Bruegel the Elder³, in which a kind of collective hysteria seems to sweep everything along with it.

The Table, Ink and graphite on paper, 58×41 cm, 2022

Neighbors, ink and graphite on paper, 58×41 cm, 2022

Rain’s Feet, ink, graphite and color pencil on paper, 58×41 cm, 2022

Often, in Ceren Oykut’s work, a city topples, transforms and is reborn from one image to the next. Living things become statues, objects are brought to life. The drawn line takes on a sensual, mischievous life of its own, absorbing and transforming whatever it touches. There is nothing that Ceren Oykut cannot draw: she borrows from a spectrum of registers, including press cartoons and graphic novels, then subverts our expectations by applying her own, unique style to a highly personal element of fantasy. Ever-changing, agile and resilient, her line captures the spirit of Istanbul, the palimpsest-city that has survived and been endlessly rebuilt through the ages. In the 7th century BCE, under a different name – Byzantium – it became the capital of an empire, even a series of empires until, as Constantinople, it stood at the crossroads of competing religions, each striving for supremacy and attempting to extend their sphere of influence, even down to the present day. Istanbul stands at a geological crossroads, too. It has survived numerous earthquakes, and is ever-alert for the next.  

Ink, color pencil and graphite on papers in various sizes, digital prints, gravure, Foto: Blaise Adilon

It was in Istanbul, a city synonymous with the fleeting passage of time, with change, impermanence and, paradoxically, survival, that Ceren Oykut first made her large-format drawings, twenty years ago, on September 15, 2003. She began by covering the walls of a house on the point of collapse. That same house can be seen in the present exhibition, drawn close to the floor on the largest wall. As such, the artist’s very first, foundational intervention is both an attempt to cover the surfaces of a structure and space (and perhaps to apply a form of magical healing to its cracks and fissures), but also a work of art destined, ineluctably, to crumble, collapse, and be erased. And yet, we may also see this ‘abandonment’ of drawing to the fate of its fragile support, this intertwining of its destiny with that of a vulnerable, time-limited building, as a paradoxical means of keeping the work of art alive. A way of enabling it to reappear in another form, in another place, and so to be endlessly reborn.  Ceren Oykut’s work shares two important characteristics with other creative forms: it can travel, it can migrate. Unconcerned with the permanency of mark-making, it cannot be easily conserved in a museum setting. Like ancient myths, carried from one place to the next by the oral tradition, or like the artworks of early humankind, the creative moment is brief, and its transmission to future generations uncertain, challenged by secrecy, loss and natural catastrophe. This is a mobile, fragile art, comparable to music, theatre and live performance. 

Foto: Xavier Jullien

Since 2017, Ceren Oykut has lived and worked in Berlin, where she has encountered an active, diverse art scene that enables her to collaborate with other artists and engage with other disciplines. She is a member of several collectives that present work for the stage, combining video and light art with live music and drawing. In her live performances, projected images are endlessly altered and transformed as she revisits the motif, filling voids that become depths, or tracing the furrows  of a new figure in a pre-existing drawing – an uninterrupted creative act that covers and superimposes itself on what has gone before, ‘cancelling’ it, the better to bring new forms into existence. 

Cutting iron with plasma cutter, Halle13, Berlin, 2023, Foto: KAI

This rapid obliteration of one image to make way for the next is also the basic principle of cinema. Ceren Oykut practices video as a craft in its own right, inspired by the earliest animation techniques, based on rapid successions of drawings⁴ (today, we are perhaps more familiar with ‘stop-motion’, using figurines). Like the artists and in-betweeners who worked on the very first animated films, she sketches out every stage of a short scene, in silent micro-videos: Sisyphean loops, steeped in poetry. She uses superimposition, too, and mixes diverse, short animation sequences that combine to suggest a chaotic, fantastical, crazy world inhabited by a multitude of characters, whose motives remain mysterious. Some row a boat that is forever drawn back towards the shore, others escape aboard an improbable array of vehicles. Repetition exerts a particular fascination, ritualising everything we see before us. These short films, shown on a loop, reflect our contemporary experience of social media: clips just a few seconds long, designed to capture our attention, and which can be endlessly replayed. In Ceren Oykut’s practice, however, these clips have more in common with sampling⁵ in recorded music.  Oykut incorporates movement into her drawings, reinforcing their illusion of autonomous life and volition, and a free existence, independent of their creator. ⁶ This act of letting-go on the part of the artist is reflected, too, in the exhibition’s design and layout. The influence of live performance is seen here in the very visible, deliberate presence of elements which are more usually kept hidden: the lighting, projectors and cables are part of the show. As we move among and around them, we note how, paradoxically, the exhibition’s display of its own technical means reinforces our sense of artificiality, and the poetry of artificiality. The presence of scaffolding may be read as a tribute to the physicality of creative artistry: we think of the painted ceilings of Renaissance and Baroque art, and the ingenious machinery and structures that have enabled the making of outsize artworks down the centuries. Designed to extend the limits of human gesture, they suggest the dare-devil bravura of the circus. We think of the physical tenacity of the earliest artists, too, venturing deep into the Chauvet cave with only the most rudimentary lighting and tools, in search of an outcrop, perhaps, from which to draw a motif on a precise section of the rock wall.

 

In this context, drawing is not a studio-based practice but an adventurous, risky undertaking whose creations are left to their own fate. Graphite dust, rock and chalk debris, the transformation of hot metal, a series of un-foreseeable events… Ceren Oykut’s art reconnects with the precarious conditions in which the very first artworks were made. Her ever-changing, endlessly adaptable line documents how each gesture is, seemingly, informed by the last. A fascinating act of renewal that captures the essential mystery of the act of drawing. 

Xavier Jullien

Iron pieces in various sizes, foto: Blaise Adilon