Although Cenk Düzyol’s second solo show at Martch Art Project, A Better Place, speaks in the language of the incommunicable of his earlier works, it signals a new direction. His incomplete narratives that nevertheless wink at the viewer from just outside the frame have left in their place a more fundamental, uncanny and unpeopled uncertainty. The compositions are now almost entirely devoid of figures: the landscape itself appears to know something it is withholding. The texts etched across the skies seem to have surfaced in an archeological dig. Horizons seem inaccessible, if not outright cordoned off, as in one painting. Although Düzyol’s paintings point to a surrealist lineage, they contain a clear will to avoid its staging of the uncanny. They ask the question and then withdraw.
In his own words, Düzyol seeks not verbal expression but “the emotion that knots in one’s throat”. He’s interested not in guiding the viewer but inviting them to go on a solitary adventure within the painting. This circles back to the quest referred to by the title: it’s our emotions, not our reason, that impose these quests on us; matters we might resolve by feeling rather than thinking, if we can resolve them at all. This invitation to abide by uncertainty bears Düzyol’s paintings beyond a mere aesthetic experience or imposed narrative. It is not necessarily about resignation but a different kind of awakening: a quiet insistence towards the possibility of not trying to make sense of everything, of taking uncertainty as a starting point rather than a threat.
This is why the writing on the canvases are an invitation rather than an explanation. I know you can carry on, take me where you're going to: this is the pre-existing voice, unnamed, in the viewer’s head that echo back to them off the surfaces in the landscapes. Although they contain the irony we recognize from Düzyol’s prior productions, they treat vulnerable moments in a different manner, whether through “narrative” or material. Like the effort to convince oneself that takes over in instances where words fall out of sync with feelings, they are paradoxical. This is the exact site of what Düzyol refers to as “the emotion that knots in one’s throat”: neither melancholy, nor truly yearning, nor hope, it’s the threshold where the three overlap.
In this sense, A Better Place signals towards both a geographical and an inner coordinate. Alive with lush foliage or otherwise barren and rocky, the landscape also contains a more-than-human rhetoric: the rare figures that seem barely to be holding on in these landscapes remind us of our powerlessness in nature, a premise that can be somewhat liberating. Humans have left mere traces on these landscapes. On the other hand, they also seem to map out an inner topography. These rock faces, these sunsets, are almost more familiar to us than our own selves. The paintings prepare us for something that we can almost make out although we cannot yet name it. And if there is no end to the searching, perhaps the best thing to do is to sit on a bench and watch the landscape, and make peace with uncertainty.