DEVABIL KARA ENGLISH
Devabil Kara’s Quest For The “Fourth Level”
Traces, shadows and things lost and found…
Let us begin with a self-portrait: a painting from 1989 – a self-portrait of the artist, pointing to the past but also, oddly, to the future. A receptacle of clues, giving notice of processes to come. Alongside the artist’s paintings from the same period, it has the insistence of a personal mark; something like a fingerprint, an excavation that has taken shape in a dark void – as if the artist had clawed it out with his fingernails, a stamp that fixes itself to the surface and veils the energy of the colors beneath. There are titles that the artist was to give to his paintings in the years to follow: “Shadow of the Mystery,” “Genesis of the Mystery,” “Wall of Mystery”… But the real mystery, the unknowable, the secret, would seem to be in this picture that so frankly states what it is.
The face, one may say, is wealth and existence. A field where the seen and unseen are there in the same place, at the same time. It is the self, but also what the self conceals. The sum of all past times and the place where will be staged the invasion of all times to come. As in the artist’s self-portrait, it is a zone where some colors will be veiled, concealed, where the surface will be scraped down, and just as created here by the movement of the artist’s line, a picture where not one but a thousand expressions take shape momentarily, elusive yet at the same time very real. The abstract geography of the soul: The setting for life and also its calendar – one can tally by its lines, and the remains of various traces can be read on this stage.
As in that self-portrait, Devabil Kara is an artist who searches behind the stage and behind the calendar, who explores while questioning the genesis of time and space, the discovery of form, and the process of composing. For this reason the self-portrait in question can act as a kind of clue. For, like the face, at heart a painting is usually an enigma. And it comes to life to the degree that the invisible is sensed as much as what is seen. Looking at Devabil Kara’s paintings from the 1980s onward, one sees an imagistic world that becomes increasingly more abstract and textured, and in this sense is an effort to grasp the ‘dimension beyond.’ Pursuing the changes that the surfaces undergo in this process, as they go from line to color and back in their formation, are scraped through or concealed by turns, it will be fruitful to return to that self-portrait and reflect on the language which the artist has built there.
It is possible to find, in other works from the artist’s same period, the clues which this self-portrait offers up: for it can be read as an expression of the experiments with color and the movement of line on which Kara embarked in the late 80s and early 90s. Seeking to convey through line movement and a bold palette the beings represented by faces and figures, the artist focuses not on subjects but on color and form. In nearly all his paintings from 1989, the figures are transformed into line and color motifs, creating a tachist impression on the canvas. The imagery he captured in this type of picture, purely through the relationships of color and form, hints for the first time at the textural effect he was to create in later works. This is an artist who from the outset of his career worked with methods such as scraping through and veiling over, and it is in the paintings of this initial period that we see the first signs that with time he would think of the conceptual dimensions of these methods to convert them, in both the concrete and abstract senses, into an archeology replete with protected sites, finds, and the hunt for a fourth level.
The works from Devabil Kara’s first period, in the late 1980s, can also be viewed as an expressionistic eruption of color energy. Here the artist, in the erstwhile words of Vlaminck, wishes to use color like a ‘‘stick of dynamite’: getting as close to the paint as his silk-screen technique will allow, he creates raucous, festive, boundless, direct fields of color, only limiting himself in that self-portrait daubed over with white, and otherwise acting with utter freedom during this period. This coloristic approach is particularly evident in the collage and mixed media works Kara executed on wood in 1989. Affixed to cut-out pieces of paper in many colors, precursors of the tablet-like forms that would appear in later works, the background consists of bright, warm, semi-circular curves of color which call to mind the Orphism of Delaunay. Invoking on the same surface structures some of which are freer, others more planned, these two opposing attitudes are a feature of nearly all Devabil Kara’s paintings: the creation of different, independent areas that cut across the rational structure.
The clearest visual evidence of this ‘high-tension line’ – if one may so call it – is a picture dated 1989 and entitled “Homage to the Master”: The work is in two parts, with a formally free zone above and a chess-board below. On the one hand we have an expressionistic painter, on the other a structure shaped by more rational thought processes, which give notice of the spatial concerns to come in future works. Symbolic as the chess-board may be in terms of meaning, one can cite other examples which seem to indicate that its purpose here is essentially geometric.
“Figure Ted,” too, from 1990, is a picture in which the artist adopts differing approaches to create tension on the surface, once more using a chess-board which formally speaking is a symbol. Here, giving visual expression to different but intermingled urges, the artist carries them to either side of a boundary line: on the one side is a freer approach to the giving of form, created through color and the movement of line, while on the other is a zone divided into lines, where the chess-board this time is defined in a purely associative manner. Into this geometric structure the artist has placed a sea-horse, a chessic knight and drawings of horses, the mutual relationships among which seem to define the differing structures between the lower right-hand and upper left-hand corners: While the cross-section arising out of the movement of line is the result of a process that admits of the accidental and follows the genesis of the artist as well, the grid composition in the background virtually renders visible the intervention of mind in this process.
Characterizing the grid as the most extreme constructive formulation that can be applied to a flat surface, Rosalind Krauss concludes that artists who employed the grid frequently in their professional careers stopped developing when they began to use this form. Krauss describes the grid as a structure which hinders the visual reflection of language, so it is interesting that Kara uses it as an apparently narrative element, with the associations of a chess-board; and that he may be aware of this is indicated, in the later works where the picture surface is built up of intersecting horizontal and perpendicular lines, by the fact that he tends to conceal this structure rather than flaunt it. In the 1990 cycle “Conversation With The Masters,” Kara lines his images up side by side as if placing them in an invisible grid, and begins to muddle the internally divided cross-sections with areas of color, sometimes even covering those images to give the impression that two pictures are superimposed. One might say that in his paintings from this period, he creates a mosaic effect by juxtaposing different shades of color in a balanced manner. One of the most striking features of his work from 1990 is the use of faces from art history, sometimes under the title “Conversation With The Masters” and sometimes without any title at all. Actually, that mosaic effect is not only the form of the paintings, but at the same time their content: Conversing with the ‘masters,’ the artist collects their words of guidance, their accumulation of experience from the past, and pastes them side by side to render them visible. These images include the self-portraits of masters from various periods of Western art, but also Kara’s own face, and in one instance elements of classical architecture. As may be gleaned from these paintings, Devabil Kara’s face is turned westward, and he uses the vocabulary of Western art, but on the other hand, we cannot ignore the fact that, especially in his approach to composition, he often has recourse to the use of motifs and repetition which in their broadest lines are characteristic of Islamic art.
In 1990, while on the one hand creating the works we have mentioned, employing a silkscreen technique, Kara at the same time continued to use paper collage and mixed media on wood. A large collage from that year, which won an Honorable Mention in a Contemporary Turkish Painting Competition, has curious affinities with his other works: The prevalance of blue; the use of the horizontal and vertical; the superimposition and juxtaposition, as with the images, of bits of paper; and despite the representational elements in the silk-screens, the clear evidence that the artist is avoiding narrative to deal with the internal problematics of art. Kara’s use of a fore and background in this type of collage, superimposing one upon the other, and his use of the area defined by the frame as a nest for, once again, a fore ground, are harbingers of paintings from the next period in which spatial concerns were to predominate. At this stage, ‘space’ is still a ground viewed from without and covered or filled with various elements; what makes the artist’s later works more interesting is, perhaps, that he dares to plunge into that space.
Four of Devabil Kara’s figurative paintings from 1991 demand to be read as darker versions of the linear-colorist works from 1989-91, with an emphasis not purely on color and form but now on expression. It seems to me that these paintings may be related to a large triptych from the same period, that was inspired by the conflict raging in Yugoslavia at that time. These works are pervaded by a dark atmosphere, and the figures are bodily ‘heaps,’ frozen, ill, in grief and afraid. Done in acrylic on canvas, they seem above all intended to convey a mood. But the presence in some of them of a cage form in the background, of a linear structure in the foreground, or, in a corner, of white tablets – and these would be determine the character of Kara’s work in the next period – can be taken as showing that he did not wish to utterly yield himself up to expressionism, colorism or the rendering of emotion. In any case this atmosphere would change before long, with the paintings Kara did in 1992: in that year the gateway to a new territory opened, one to which only hints had been given in all the preceding work.
1992 was the period in which tablets covered with white began to appear in the paintings, cross-sections of images lined up and provided with code numbers as if they were stones that had been discovered in some archeological dig. It was also a quite experimental period: On the one hand there was a work entitled “End of the Conversation Cycle,” where the masters were once again stacked up on the canvas, but exceedingly vague, and shoved into the background, as if the artist were saying he had dropped this theme. In this painting there is an almost monochrome structure, made up of pastel tablets entirely covered with white. In another picture the structure found in the “Conversation” cycle has been preserved, but the title, as if meant to call up the subject matter of the next period, is “Journey to Different Times.” Two paintings executed in 1992 are of particular importance: “Circular Area” and “Archaic Museum.” The latter especially, with its small shapes – one might call them image stones – placed in a grid of horizontal and vertical lines, ranged each with its code number, truly seems to transport the viewer to an archeological museum. Giving a visual representation of the inventory system used by museums, their efforts to classify and date, this painting marks one of the first times that the interest in archeology which Devabil Kara began to feel around 1990 makes its appearance in his art.
Excavation and its results… Kara collects the pictures he painted in 1993 and 94 under the heading “Archeological Site.” And the “Self-Portrait” which once again crops up in this period now looks like a personal trace of the artist, lodged among other element, among other image cross-sections that are like ‘finds.’ In this painting, entitled “Invasion of a Site With Self-Portrait,” we see that Devabil Kara is now building his works like a protected archeological site, but that in this site, along with certain bits and pieces extending from the past to the present, he uses his own personal world of imagery as a material. Perhaps the fundamental theme of the pictures Kara began to paint in 1993 is time. Endeavoring to question the meaning of time, and its signs, these pictures have the title “Archeological Site” which points to an ancient past, but at the same time embraces a more recent past and the present: Think of all those code numbers, the tearing free from the space of the past to land in our day, the systematic classification in a museum, the description and codification… In this context “Entrance to the Playing Field” is a particularly interesting example: A picture which embraces the different tendencies of Devabil Kara’s work to that time, but, as the title indicates, promises the entrance into a new field. It is made up of coded image cross-sections juxtaposed in a circular form that is framed by areas of paint that call to mind the works Kara had done using color and the movement of line. The tension in nearly all of Kara’s work is emphasized by the contrast between the disorder of these image cross-sections and the order which is secured by providing each of them with a code number. Meanwhile the predominantly white geometric form, with its tablet, invading the circular field, makes one think of another archeological site as yet undiscovered, uncoded and unclassified.
Kara’s stance in “Entrance to the Playing Field” can be seen as an attempt to bring together all those visual tendencies which, though in a sense connected, in appearance lead to differing effects. In other pictures from 1993 as well, such as “Voyage,” “Composition” (where various objects are stuck to the canvas in addition to the painting) or “Journey to Different Times,” it is this variety which primarily strikes one – in this period the artist seems to be doing not one but several pictures, and using several visual languages, but he brings them all together on one surface. During this period the variety of which we are speaking is, I think, best resolved, with the different tendencies integrated rather than jostling, in a painting entitled “Gap” – the situating of the various elements among the interstices of thick horizontal and vertical lines, and the quiet atmosphere of the work as a whole, makes it easier to focus on the image and consider the different visual elements in the picture.
Although the paintings Devabil Kara did in 1993-94 are given the collective title “Archeological Site,” they constitute a new departure which may be pointed up by the changing characteristics of his art during these two years. Earlier we said that the idea of an archeological site stemmed from Kara’s interest in this field, but that as exemplified in the 1989 “Self-Portrait” the methods of scraping through and covering could in reality be seen as a consequence of exploration in the intellectual foundation as well. We know that the “Archelogical Site” paintings arose out of the artist’s visits to museums, but one might also assert that the systematization which so impressed him there was already part of his make-up, and can be read as one perspective of the earlier works. Devabil Kara is concerned with unearthing and rendering visible the past (and its signs) that has been excavated and buried – in the sense his archeological site is rooted in a much more personal and psychological foundation. It can be said that the 1993 paintings are still playing with this idea, and indeed constitute a kind of representation of the coding systems employed by museums. The works that begin in 1994, on the other hand, seek, or so it seems, to render visible the intellectual underpinnings of these coding systems. In these paintings, where there is less color and where areas of white are spread over the surface, reminiscent of the texture of walls, the misty zones of white with their tablets, carried over from the earlier pictures, interleave with those containing coded cross-sections of images. Rather than the gouging of lines in areas of color, this latter element is used more sparingly so as to create a textural effect; and one is struck by the greater equilibrium among the areas which make up the composition. In these paintings, the giving of code numbers on real strips of metal does not, as in the previous works, create a crowded impression, but on the contrary backs up the idea to which the artist is striving to give visual expression – as in “Archeological Site,” which is one of the best works from this period. It is interesting to compare the 1994 paintings “Invasion of the Site” and “Door Ajar” with “Gap,” “Empty Space,” “White Ladder” and “Invasion of the Site With Its Ladder,” all from that same year. For the first time the artist leaves blanks in the picture surface, and concerns himself with the feeling of the void which these areas create. Rather than filling up the canvas he strives to render the blanks visible through textural effects, and plays with the laws of perspective to generate intriguing spatial perceptions.
For this reason, certain paintings executed by Devabil Kara in 1994 can be taken as harbingers of a new period, one which can be explored under the heading “Traces and Shadows,” which he uses to describe the half-decade of work from 1995 to 2000. The predominant elements from this period, objects such as the chair and the ladder which reappear continually, begin to emerge sometimes as a trace and sometimes as a shadow, taking on an importance which transcends the symbolic. Both the chair and the ladder have associations which arise from cultural conditioning, but these do not interest Kara, who in the paintings from this period is more involved with spatial concerns. On the intellectual plane, it is also possible to establish a connection between, on the one hand, the phenomenon of traces and shadows, and on the other hand the idea lying behind the archeological sites: seeing traces and shadows as the expression of permanence and loss, the artist this time opens the doorways of a more spiritual archeological site: one might say that in the psychoanalytical sense excavation is a journey to the deeper levels of the soul, and that the traces and shadows in Devabil Kara’s paintings from this period signify mental processes and indeed existence itself. During this period, just as with the “Archeological Sites,” the artist is once again dealing with finds, but now those finds are the expression of far more subjective territory, as the representation of the systems used in museums turns into the exploration of memory. This stance is exemplified, in such pictures from this period as “The Mystery Is Penetrated,” “Toward The Depths,” “Corridor of Mystery” and “A Still Mysterious Tragedy,” by the simplification and covering of the earlier clear-cut, colorful cross-sections, as they are in a way pushed into the background and used as traces which are left in shadow.
The elements of chair and ladder which Devabil Kara used until the second half of the 1990s are assessed by Hüsamettin Koçan, not as signs of rising or status, but as images of ‘distancing,’ and Koçan provides important clues concerning the exploration of memory, that phenomenon which I too wish to underline. Saying that these elements move into the shadows to take on a commemorative value, Koçan maintains that each of them is an act of signification directed toward the past. The trace left by an object, the shadow cast by memory, and the present moment as the vague summation of the past: such would appear to be the foci of Kara’s interest.
I should add that the chair described in these paintings is in fact that in the artist’s own studio! When I learned this I thought of a story: The 5th-century B.C. Greek poet Simonides was speaking at a dinner when there came a knock at the door, and the poet was called outside by two people whose praises he had been singing in the speech. No sooner was he through the door than the house collapsed, crushing everyone within. Because the bodies were unrecognizable, the task of remembering who was who fell to Simonides, and he could only do it by recalling where everyone had sat. This phenomenon of ‘place,’ one of the most important conditions for remembering, comes to the fore and indeed becomes the subject matter in Kara’s paintings from this period, where space has its say and objects exist thanks to their traces and shadows within that space. When he speaks of these paintings, which have the collective title “Traces and Shadows,” his language serves to elucidate this connection between memory, space and objects: “On this planet, change of place and disappearance over time bring new developments in their wake, and the trace which carries the energy of the vanished entity while providing clues for the future as to its existence thus prevents utter forgetfulness and loss. Because of the need to comprehend and explain, all objects have been provided with identities and definitions, and thereby rendered permanent in time. The traces they leave, however, indefinable and without identity, have become elements of the imagination. Equally, shadows become one with the textures of their milieu to shake free of the essence-concealing shell and acquire a different identity.”
Looking within this framework at such 1995 works as “Corridor of Mystery,” “Lost Territory,” “A Still Mysterious Tragedy,” “Wall of Mystery,” “Playing Field,” “Unknown Invader” and “Pass,” all from the series “Traces and Shadows,” one indeed feels that elements like the chair and ladder are used as ‘distancing’ elements; and the codes too in nearly all these paintings are more vague, and white to boot, as they begin to be used like a thin veil of mist. Once again, what we first make out and see are that ladder and chair: like a chain linking all the paintings from this period, do they remind us of where we are?
Another intriguing aspect of certain pictures from the “Traces and Shadows” cycle is that in this period Devabil Kara begins to paint interior spaces. Perhaps one may view this genre of work, along with the proliferation of textural areas that sometimes cover the entire canvas, as the outcome of a tendency to establish a structure which will dominate the whole painting. Generally, the visual pleasure given by the surface texture in Kara’s work, and the flitting associations of the shadowy, misty objects, occur within an orderly structure. This type of characteristic, as indicated by the titles, expresses something mysterious in the mental processes of the artist, something that remains in the dark and cannot be delimited. In compositions which declare their intention to establish a certain order, the freer, more open-ended approach which surreptitiously rebels against that order and calls upon the viewer to use his or her imagination within the bounded visual field is less in evidence in the works from this period. Whereas actually all these ‘other elements’ seem to be engaged in a constant struggle to assert their own existence within the order: as the eye is drawn to the traces and shadows of objects, the textural areas which sometimes appear to be pictures-within-the-picture invite one to meditation, while the symbolism of the objects arrests the mind. In this respect Devabil Kara’s paintings from this period would seem to be like a room which the artist has built for himself: In rooms of our own, all the vagaries of memory are staged and exhibited; and objects take on other, special meanings, giving them tongue. Perhaps the concern with composition in the Kara paintings that give the feeling of interior space is a matter of thinking rationally about all these vague, paradoxical and intuitive phenomena. Examples would be such paintings as “Shadow of the Mystery,” “Towards the Depths,” “The Mystery Opens,” “Aging Parliament” and “Corridor of Mystery.”
A different understanding of space is evinced by certain Kara paintings from 1995, with their circular forms and spiral staircases depicted among textural areas and inside rectangular forms. There is a fundamental difference between these and the other works: In the other works the eye views the image from without, but here, as symbolized in the spiral stairway, the regard is from above. This angle of view means that we see the space of the painting as a void, and the feeling thereby generated is spread over the surface and expressed through textures built up from color. This is the first hint of later Devabil Kara paintings where emptiness itself will be seen as a plane.
The 1997 work “Deep Void” is precisely the outcome of such a concern. I say “concern” because the artist usually provides further clues through his titles. To create layers or levels and then cover them over; to leave a trace or mark and then veil it in shadow; to work with textures but divide those textures up with strict geometric forms or lines – are all these approaches perhaps meant to curb an intoxication with the depths?
The change Devabil Kara began to undergo in the new millennium is, this time, entitled “The 4th Level.” Once again he starts with an archeological concept, and once again there is a quest. This interest in archeology, and the paintings which extend from “Archeological Sites” to “The 4th Level,” their atmosphere quieter annd more abstract as they progress, and concerned not with filling space but with rendering empty space visible, have a developmental process fueled by motivating forces that are best explained by the artist:
“On a visit to the Museum of Archeology, my eye was especially caught by certain artifacts lying in display cases with their labels. For some reason, that day I experienced a curious feeling – these objects, torn from their surroundings and brought to this building, drew my attention in a special way. Just as Lipps had done, I felt an incredible sadness and joy at the same time. Joy in being presented with these objects, but then the knowledge that they had been taken from the place where they belonged… I looked at the labels and codes, and saw that each artifact brought before me was like some cipher, a piece of Byzantium, Rome or Urartu. Just imagine, a single piece of matter that contained knowledge about a whole past era. An object which actually you could put in your pocket, but which harbors an incredible repertory! At that moment I thought of this homeless object as a living creature. I wonder, I said, what it felt when it was torn away. The long and short of it is that we are wrenching it from history – taking it from its mother’s lap to put it in a different place. Later, that mother’s lap began to concern me more than the artifact itself. That is, the place where that piece of stone belonged, its real past – perhaps that is what I was trying to arrive at. On my canvasses, too, I rip the artifacts from their mother’s lap and put them somewhere else. Creating a kind of museum. Whereas when the stones are wrenched from their place, the gap that is left behind has the real interest: you see how nature had embraced it, clasped it to its bosom… As time went by, the artifacts began to be discarded from my work, and very few objects were left. Perhaps by now I am looking for those gaps, and the excavation site. I’m trying to find out how we perceive the empty spaces around us.”
Looking at the works of Devabil Kara produced in the interval from 2000 to the present, we can say that all the tendencies of the past have become more refined, creating a greater effect of wholeness on the canvas. In these paintings the textural areas are worked into the geometric composition, and the superimposed surfaces, which are like pictures-within-pictures, complement one another to make up a balanced whole. Here the gaps left by the homeless artifacts from the “Archeological Sites” are used to build up the impression of a wall, which sometimes makes up a background covering the entire canvas. In paintings from the year 2000 such as “Stranger,” “Find,” “Time Clock” and “Find II,” this overall structure is built up using geometric composition and geometric elements added to the surface; and in 2001, “Up To The Surface,” “Signs,” “Marked Sites,” “Site With Squares” and “Flight From The Blue Square” evince the same approach. In all these pictures, though Kara continues to use elements from his previous work, he pursues an effect that covers the canvas as a whole, perhaps as a consequence of the effort which he mentions above, to “perceive empty spaces.”
In 2001 the textural areas spread, and there are small empty spaces over the entire surface, placed in a grid and acting as metaphors for the artifacts which have been torn from their places in the archeological sites. Very rarely do we meet with objects any more in these pictures – it is more a question of abstract geometrical fields drifting in the void. In this period Kara directs his attentions to the painting surface itself – creating broad areas of color, using experimental techniques as he focuses on the paint, creating layers which he then scrapes through or files down, sometimes wetting, then drying, the surface, and seeking to capture a kind of expression purely through color. But apart from this urge to create texture on the surface of the painting, he has not abandoned his concern with imparting geometric form: Squares, triangles and rectangles divide up the surface, sometimes with a narrative value of their own, opening windows and doorways on the canvas. An example might be “Maverick Terrain,” where the title points to the separateness of two zones in the painting. And “Triangular Gap,” “Search For Finds In Two Different Sites,” “Limited Power” – these too deserve consideration in this context.
In certain Devabil Kara paintings from 2001-2002, however, geometric forms with stricter lines appear on the surface as a band. In works such as “Story of a Find,” “Excavation In A Red Zone,” and “Discovery,” the feeling of space is built up entirely through color, while there is a deliberate intention to avoid the elements used in earlier paintings. Indeed, as one notes in “Discovery” and “Story of a Find,” the impulse to give geometric shape to things has been worked into the color and texture, and pushed back so as not to disrupt the monochromatic surface. Looking at the more calculated and designed zones or bands that divide up these surfaces, we are struck by the presence of an equivalent for the opposition created within the paintings: free brush strokes, surfaces created through sheer texture, figurative elements, and little geometric compositions, all side by side and together.
In actual fact, what we have been describing in terms of individual paintings are cross-sections from a long odyssey, one which, in Kara’s own words, can be expressed by allusion to such archeological concepts as “Protected Site” and “The Fourth Level.” Truly, we have witnessed the transformation into the void itself of small gaps symbolizing the artifacts which have been torn from their places – and from looking at little objects that the archeological site yielded up, we have gone to finding ourselves within that very site: and perhaps the entire painting surface has been transformed into a metaphor for the empty space one exposes on lifting a stone. At one point we said that an archeological excavation was in fact a journey to the layers of the mind and spirit; and perhaps this it was that made archeology appealing to an artist who was interested in traces and shadows, and in things lost and found – forgetfulness and remembrance, slices of life first buried and then unearthed, and objects. What the artist displayed through these metaphorical excavations or tricks of memory were in essence what remained after he had passed through the filter of his own experience: lees and dregs rendered visible and labeled, as on the painting surface. Things left from the living day, in the sense of an entire history and past. And of course another interpretation of this odyssey would involve the tradition of modern painting, the artist’s creation of a subjective visual language using such elements as form, color, light, composition and texture – since the large-scale collages and tempered figurative abstractions of the late 1980s, and the paintings of 1987-88 with their dream-like atmosphere based on color, Kara has been exploring the possibilities of abstraction through different means. In this context, one interesting thing about Devabil Kara is his combining on the same surface of geometric abstraction rooted in a constructivist tradition together with a much freer, more expressive approach. Consciously building up his work out of certain elements, he brings to mind Mallarmé’s assertion that “sonnets are written with words, not ideas” – although what guides Kara and could be considered his ‘main idea’ is archeology. Such paintings from 2001-2002 as “Secret II,” “Concerning The Past,” “Secret,” “Magma” and “The 4th Level” constitute the final point of this odyssey, as the picture surface is finally transformed into empty space itself, and perception is locked on color and texture, with geometric forms or lines being completely internalized by the picture surface. Trace and shadow are by now the painting itself. Together with this abstraction, Devabil Kara has resolved, simplified and silenced the tension among the varying tendencies in his work.
This silence we speak of here is a deep one, like that Henry Miller describes: “A silence so intense it feels like Niagara Falls in my ears”. The silence of Kara’s paintings carries the intellectual accumulation of the years gone by, but in a more general sense it also encompasses the centuries of questing for which the picture surface has been a stage. When all the layers have been peeled away, the void that remains, the nakedness and purity, have much to tell, or perhaps nothing. The work by now is a mirror confronting the spectator.
Ahu Antmen
Istanbul, 2002
