past projects/exhibitions
-selected-
appoaches/yaklaşmalar
milli reasürans sanat galerisi,istanbul/2011
Lines in black, surface in white, these classical elements of design, create the structural tools for painter Coşkun Demirok’s newest works. On large canvases achromatic lines cut across one another, sometimes one by one, sometimes crisscrossing and sometimes creating grid-like forms. Connected to a concept, Demirok has progressively continued this intellectual and structural form of language. Rather than single works of art, he is more interested in grouped series. Concentrating on concepts, delving, delving deeper, pulling away, and as a detail leaving them to become. But, always the main point is to question painting.
Not selecting colorful, active figurative elements, narrative stories, or spaces and people as a point of departure, this style of painting studies peripheral areas. In a totally withdrawn state, concentrating on nuances, and within a concept he has created, he follows the mental progress on canvas. Of course, in this state, canvas and color can both be used experimentally. Surfaces to be painted, sometimes turned around, sometimes left alone, are hung on the wall or placed on the floor. In addition to brushes, long thin sticks are used to spread the colors onto the canvas. Original structures, contours, and silhouettes develop. And here the degree of density of the paint plays a role. When concentrated and generous portions of paint are used, the emerging paint drops – again in linear form - support the structure of the picture.
The concepts of Coşkun Demirok act within this area of tension. And in contrast to all the rigidity and restraint in his paintings, spontaneity gives or desires to give a freedom that becomes a dynamic act and this controlled yet free style connects to Action Painting and the dripping technique created in the 1950’s. In this way, Demirok conquers the coincidental and inserts the dynamic into a planned structure.
The pleasure of experimenting and the openness (to everything) that the artist feels during the creation process appears in this Istanbul exhibition. Born in Ankara, but living in or near the German city of Düsseldorf since the 1970’s, Demirok travels to the city of his ancestors, the native city of his parents. Taking this into consideration, he develops the exhibition using the characteristics of a site-specific installation. The pictures to be exhibited will be developed in two months while the artist lives in Istanbul as “artist in residence”. Beginning with concepts thought about in Düsseldorf and certainly changed by the impressions of a city inhabited by millions of people this is an openly formed series of works. It is not surprising that he does not depart from his basic concept. For many years Coşkun Demirok has been experimenting with the above-defined style of painting. Beginning by working within a system of woven paint, he uses a minimalist style. For him, central questions revolve around the relationship of the part to the whole and the micro to the macro. Using the numbering system he developed, his work can be seen as single pieces or as a series. Furthermore, he uses the classic painting forms of dual works, diptych, and triple works, triptych. However, twelve or more pieces may come together to form work. Whether arranged adjacently, in combinations or compilations spread widely on the wall, for Demirok the subject of his installation, the subject of a single work together with the subject of the support network all allude to the same area of interest.
Taking into consideration his affinity with and particular interest in space, we are not surprised to learn that Coşkun Demirok studied architecture. The structural and grid systems he establishes are related to condense three dimensional line and surface experiments. Canvases become tools for experiments with diversities in depth and expansion of space. Wall compositions composed of an individual work create a particular feeling of spatial depth. Formal designs in small dimensions are transformed into macro dimensions.
Designs, described in a more concrete way as brush designs using the wash technique, have recently become more important for the artist. Rapid and focused shapes transferred to paper as a series of drawings, emerge as preliminary sketches or a type of “disegno”. Even if this does not mean that every sketch will later be transformed into a painting, it still signifies a point of inspiration and a beginning. The severity seen in the grids and woven lines of his paintings also appear in his paper works. In spite of this, when compared with his other work, the dimensions that could be considered small open up new levels for the artists. From this perspective they become independent. The flowing style of painting renders more freedom as it leaves more responsibility for the hand and less for the brain.
Pictures made using black watercolor paint in the wash technique can always be associated to the pictorial structure of Asian paintings, to calligraphic pictures, and to famous minimal paintings of landscape and figures in interior space. The eye tends to convey to the brain that every horizontal line and space around the human figure is a landscape. Every vertical tends to remind one of a landscape element that resembles a tree. And even though the human figure itself is always shown as a horizontal element, when defined within a space, it exists as a vertical.
Therefore, during his stay in Istanbul, we are curious to see whether Coşkun Demirok emphasizes severity or the freedom of shape and space. With its unique position on the Bosphorus Sea, this metropolis is full of innumerable sources of stimulation. Nevertheless, concepts transformed into pictures will enrich the art scene. Certainly, for the artist, the exhibition, and the spectators, an interesting exchange will take place.
Dr.Christine Vogt
seeking limits/gidebildiğince
ArtCollection Gallery,istanbul/2014
Sevil Dolmacı on Demirok‘s „Seeking Limits“ Seeking Limits...
The formal roots of early 20th-Century abstraction are located in simple geometric and organic forms which were transformed in the hands of various artists from the 1940’s onward, to Abstract Expressionism in the 1970’s. The result was a new range of stylistic configurations of sharp distinction and broad variation, carrying references to earlier trends.
It is possible to find traces of those geometric forms in Coskun Demirok's abstract works, but he, in a sense, updates these forms, transforming them in context-less compositions that resist the impression of representation, an idea central to Modernism. But even though Demirok’s compositions appear to conform to the ideas of harmony, rhythm and order which Modernism proposed, he also develops very deliberately the blurring of marks and blotches of colour stain - suggesting unfinished process or even, accident - as part of his attempt to define his own contemporary language.
The artist uses the ordering of marks as a strategy to set up the opposition of connectedness to unconnected-ness, the vivid or evocative to the ineffective, the critical to the indifferent. As the artist states, the works may be regarded as framing important contemporary philosophical or Art historical questions, but they don't necessarily propose answers to those questions. His intention is also never to add meaning or give affirmation to an idea. On the contrary, the artist wants to break with the established legitimacy of an Art movement and its stereotypes, and instead chooses to disturb and fragment, creating a sense of fragility and illogic.
There is the suggestion of such contradictions throughout these works. It is the artist’s apparent wish to surprise the audience with illusions that appear and then fade, cohere and then dissolve, particularly in the series entitled Gidebildigince (Seeking Limits).
The artist chooses a white background for these paintings, creating a strong visual contrast in compositions which are developed, on the one hand, to establish the forms, and on the other, to collapse them. The thickly-gelled impasto use of paint is also important here, producing a surprising volume in the linear strokes, usually in black, red or Prussian blue. These enlivened linear marks which dissect the white background and disperse without order almost explode against the white background, creating a mobile structure across the whole composition, the structural integrity of which is then undermined by its incompleteness and what appear to be accidental extensions of dripped paint.
The particular colour selection contributes to the dynamism of the paintings’ structure and surface. According to some colour theories white increases concentration and the red applied onto it becomes especially vibrant and stimulating. On the other hand, black is the colour of balance, whereas blue signifies infinity and authority, and grays are the colours of memory...they speak of inbetween-ness. The artist chooses these colours to enhance the abruptness of the forms they describe, rather than for their resonance with an embodied narrative. The colours seem to have been carefully chosen, but there are those other elements which could be taken as accidental. By the contradictions Demirok sets up in his paintings, and by playing with visual ambiguity, he provokes an engagement between the painting and the audience. However, what stays in the mind of the viewer is not the ambiguity but the vibrant, mobility and energy captured within what nonetheless remains a generally calm surface.
In his process, Demirok seeks new solutions on canvas with paint, including the repeated removal of paint and the scratching of the surface. He creates a painted image that never ends. In his infinite alterations, experimentations and incompleteness, he suggests the impossible task of Sisyphus. A video work explains this well. In the video, a painting starts, forms emerge, paint is removed, the painted surface is defaced and the process repeats itself in an infinite loop. This is the record of an action without end.
Sevil Dolmaci
Teaching Assistant
Yeditepe University, Istanbul
çizgilerden ve lekelerden/
von Linien und flecken
Galerie Mönter,meerbusch/2009
of lines and blotches
Coşkun Demiroks works presented here distinguish themselves by the reduction of artistic techniques: the focus on individual lines, blotches and patches, the restriction on few colors and the self-imposed restraint on the movement of the painting hand. The paintings refuse to point to some extraneous significance beyond themselves, to refer to anything beyond their own realness. The line as such, applied to the canvas with a brush or slat, is Coşkun Demirok's recurring pictorial figure. It epitomises construction, scientific measurement, spatial perspective and architecture. It is the symbol of Platonic ideas and intellect, to which the sensuality of colors is subordinate. Coşkun Demirok liberates the line from this imposed significance and explores its possibilities as independent element of composition. It becomes a corporeal and autonomous entity that dominates the passive surface with its own grammar. The results are not geometric constructions, but rather visual debates about composition - condensation, dissolution, calm, aggregation – and perception. The superimposition of lines points to the dimension of time by revealing the succession of hand movements, and thus the chronology of artistic creation. Drawn horizontally, vertically and diagonally, they cross the pictorial boundary to the infinite space beyond. Some, placed sparingly, form open and transparent structures, while others cluster together at centers of force, or condense themselves to literally block the underlying surface out. Black and White dominate, the colors of graphic and sketch, of utmost contrast and most direct impact.
The observer has to deal with the paintings' refusal of outside reference, their resistance to significance. The eye samples the surface, explores the space created by the lines, fathoms its depths and attunes what it grasps to its visual memory. Associations of Architecture and Topography materialize. Perceiving the colors themselves, the dynamics of composition, the pictorial drama, is only possible by shutting out the Known. Each line remains, despite the reduced means of composition and the confined hand movement, an individual subjective expression, clearly distinct in color development and intensity, varying in width, uneven at the edges, sometimes only hinted at and vulnerable in its imperfection.
The blotch paintings follow this principle of reduction as well. Coşkun Demirok employs Black, Blue and Red, colors rich in contrast on bright ground, and spills a precisely defined amount of color. The blotches vary in color, density and contour and seem to float against the background.
By the interaction of idiosyncracy in style, of strict rules and of chance, works are created that envision contradictions and turn them into the agent of artistic expression. Works that are sober as well as of great sensitivity, and that delight the beholder.
Pia vom Dorp
traces/izler
Atlas Sanat Galerisi,Ankara/2006
Coskun Demirok's work thrives on the radical reduction to the pictorial elements of line and plane. He is not interested in the line shaped by the movement of the hand, the "duktus," but rather the line in its specific form of the straight line, as the shortest connection between two points. Distance from individual duktus is achieved by Coskun Demirok through his choice of tools, which restrict free movement on the picture surface according to their specifications. Initially, he exchanged the soft brush for slats, which he dipped in paint and pressed onto the picture surface, creating a network of intersections and parallels through minimal rotation. What remained on the sheet was less a picture of things than the trace of things. If he works with the brush again today, he draws the line using a ruler, which not only guides his hand but also shows him the measurability of the line. But precisely through the presumed objectification of the stroke, features of painting emerge with particular clarity in subtle differences from the imagined mathematical ideal. The stroke reveals itself as an inhomogeneous structure, where the oil paint – always a dark blue, occasionally combined with a red – adheres to the paper with varying strength in response to the pressure of the hand. The stroke also has a center and periphery, thriving on densification and loosening.
Although the process of work is very quick and unplanned, the viewer associates the interplay of the vertical and horizontal – partly pieced together – with landscape and architecture. By denying titles to his paintings, Coskun Demirok repeatedly directs attention to the painterly quality of the lines. What one discovers there in terms of structures on a small scale is found in another group of works as an enlarged section of the line in the background. Here too, he limits chance by working wet on wet with a spatula, which in turn, due to its restricted mobility, significantly determines the material structure, which now appears spatial.
With his painting, Coskun Demirok explores the paradoxical effect that even the measurable line on the surface always creates the illusion of space, with a horizontal always recognized as a horizon. However, the resulting spaces are wider and larger than the limited line. The scale and the perspective born from randomness make one's own position and relationship to things visible.
Jutta Saum