Colour Fields Exposed and Drawing in Paintings
New pictorial designs by the artist Ahmet Oran
“Any change in painting, any progress in painting, will from now on include a change in painting techniques.”
Helen Frankenthaler[1]
Throughout his artistic career, his great skills as a painter and his well-honed instincts have enabled Ahmet Oran to create constantly new and surprising images. In recent years, the artist has strikingly developed his large-format canvases and expressive colouring and gone further in the direction of a free, gestural painting style.
Opening the painting
On a canvas grounded in black, Ahmet Oran will apply several monochrome paint layers in colours such as blue, red, yellow or grey. The sequence of colours and the colour tones are defined in advance with great precision. Once the last layer has been applied and worked on – sometimes the image will remain monochrome, sometimes several colours will be allowed to blend on the surface – the artist starts “opening the painting” as he likes to call it. Frequently working on more than one canvas at the same time, Oran employs different palette knives and pieces of wood of varying sizes. For years they have replaced brushes as his painting tools, enabling him to draw fine lines or scrape wide strips into the surface. His practised hand decides the depth to which the paint layers will be removed and how much pressure he needs to apply to the palette knife or piece of wood. The changes in pressure will convey different intensities, combinations and structures to the colours that are thus revealed.
The artist works under enormous time constraints, for the oil paints need to be wet. Although it may take a long while for them to dry – when applied in thick layers it may be weeks or even months –, there is only a brief window for working them in the manner of Ahmet Oran. Very soon a fine skin will form on the surface, which cannot be scraped off cleanly. It will tear and destroy the smooth surface, preventing the artist from tracing exact lines or revealing clearly contoured fields. This is why the working process needs to be completed within four or five days, sometimes even faster than that. But Oran is well prepared. He makes drafts and pre-paints his images virtually on a computer. In this way he can gain a first impression of the colour composition and its effect and define where the thin and thick lines will later appear on the canvas. On this basis he develops the sequence and colour tone of the individual layers and records them in writing, which tells him later where which colour is going to emerge in the revealing process. The nuances of colours, through the artist’s decision whether to take a stronger or weaker green, blue or red, determine the power of the image, making or breaking its impact, mood and evocative power.
Although the computer design represents the basic concept of the paintings and his painterly approach has been well prepared, the paintings in no way give the impression of having been rigorously composed, let alone executed in an inflexible manner. On the contrary, the expressive gesture invests them with an air of lightness and spontaneity. Spontaneity is, of course, always part of the painting process, and there are many aspects the artist cannot – and does not seek to – plan with precision. When stepping in front of the canvas he acts freely, intuitively, deciding every step anew as he goes along. When applying the paints and drawing the lines, this freedom is indispensable for an immediate reaction to the image and its haptic presence, for keeping an eye on where the hand guides the palette knife and what there is to be revealed and discovered under the surface. Planned coincidence plays an essential role in the process.
Ultimately, however, he needs to get every line and field right the first time. The technique does not allow for corrections or repairs, a common phenomenon otherwise in painting. This is why the artist is under great strain, mentally and physically, until the process is completed. If the artist errs, the painting is lost for ever.
Painting as a processual, self-reflexive medium
Oran manages to make the viewer feel how important the time aspect is in the act of painting. Whilst it is probably not a conscious artistic objective, the technique of applying several layers to the canvas and subsequently exposing them makes the flow of the creative process graspable. One can almost see how Oran develops his ideas, how he struggles with the canvas, how the work of art slowly takes shape. In the result the viewer perceives the process of creation and understands its essential features.
Oran’s paintings are abstract and include no reference to figurative elements. They are reduced to the essentials: colour and form – luminescent colours, powerful, elongated lines, strips laid on thickly with a palette knife. The painter’s gesture is radical, immediate and without embellishments; the gestural abstraction is executed clearly and consistently. If any forms that would permit figurative interpretation emerge during the painting process, the artist will deliberately eliminate them. Nothing is allowed to detract from painting in its purest form. Whenever a narrative is depicted, an artist can withdraw or even hide behind it. But when the painting act is laid bare, as in Oran’s work, it needs to speak for itself.
With his focus reduced to fundamental painting processes, Ahmet Oran can be considered a representative of processual painting, a group in which he occupies a place fully his own. One of the various experiments and strategies of processual painting consisted in developing pictorial designs from the fundamental characteristics and interactions of colours instead of deriving them from concepts of narrative or composition. Creatively guided self-presentation of painting is generated in this context by means of painting on and over, by palette knife in- filling, dripping, spraying, dipping, pouring, etc. Here the consistency of the pigment and its relation to gravity and the characteristics of the picture support become visible. The gestural and processual painting of Informel prepared the way but became increasingly academic and thus a target of antagonism. In their purest and reduced form, the results of processes of this nature are the monochromes by Yves Klein or the patter-like All-over Structures to be found in Jackson Pollock’s “Drip Paintings”. There is a dense spectrum of differing variants of this phenomenon up to the present day.[2]
The radical negation of figuration in favour of colour and form, the act of opening the pictorial field, the value accorded to the paint material or the use of coincidence: Oran represents a notion of painting which is based on self-reference and wants to enable the viewer to enjoy a profound perceptive moment. His paintings make do without traditional functions of a painting such as imitation or illusion; they do not seek to depict and they convey no narrative. This is painting at its self-reflective best, arising from the very act of painting and going back to its fundamental characteristics. It is painting which still keeps its format but reduces the designing act to aspects of colour and painting processes. The approach is clearly defined and repeated in every individual painting or series of paintings.
The unlimited painting
His new paintings all have the same format. They consist of three parts with a total size of 250 by 190cm. Whereas the exact dimensions do not matter as such, it is important for these paintings to be large. Painting in the style of Oran needs a big surface in order to unfold its power and expressive potential. Numerous repetitions of painting processes mean that these paintings do not have a central focus to attract the eye. The countless lines and strips are distributed across the entire canvas, pointing beyond the expanse of the canvas and generating a sense of infinity. Their expanding and overflowing dynamism transcends the pictorial surface. A viewer standing in front of the picture realises that this is just a small excerpt of the artist’s reality. The end of the canvas is not the end of the picture. The limitless, unending picture can only be represented in sections because of human limitations. And as a viewer one should – similar to the artist while he is painting – always keep moving, go nearer to the surface, study a detail, then step back again in order to “see” the infinite.
The end of the material painting is not random, however, and the painted section has been chosen with great care. The balance must be kept, the composition must be complete for the principle of the picture to work. The fact that Oran paints pictures in three parts has quite pragmatic reasons: the canvases are easier to transport and will more easily fit into the studio or a gallery. But there is yet another aspect: every canvas is complete in itself, although the painting continues and each section is part of a larger whole. The paintings may be shown as a triptych, but also individually on different walls. The eye will re-compose the pictures as a whole.
Each paint layer is at least one millimetre thick, so that relief-like structures emerge when a layer is removed. Seen from nearby, particularly from the side, the paintings have a very plastic, three-dimensional surface. It is striking to note in this context that the colour layers and lines are continued across the small edges of the canvas, which reinforces the object- like, haptic character of the paintings.
Continuity and re-invention
The work of recent years was created in Istanbul. It is hard to say whether the sound, the melody, the noise of the city have a direct influence on the painting. One is, however, greatly tempted to assume that this is so. Before that, Oran lived and worked in Vienna for a long time, and many of the paintings he created there were kept in a reticent monochrome, meditative and tranquil, the colouring soft and gentle. Now the colour palette has changed, has become more diverse, often bright and shrill. The monochrome surface is torn open everywhere, the paintings have a rhythmic dynamism full of movement and momentum, sometimes full of unrest.
Although the painting style seems to have changed greatly at first glance, closer inspection reveals continuity and a stringent development of previous work. In the 1990s, Oran started to open the canvas, to which several colour layers had been applied, by removing parts of it – although at the time he mostly removed only the top or bottom part of the painting in a horizontal direction. He “skins the painting”, as Tayfun Belgin, director of the Osthaus Museum in Hagen (Germany) once very aptly put it. Closing the canvas with paint and opening it again: this is still true of his work today. The way he removes the paint, which reminds me of breathing, has now become much more diverse : apart from horizontal and vertical tracks, one now finds inclined and crossing lines and fields of different density and thickness. The pressure applied varies greatly, so that more than one colour is peeled off simultaneously and impressive patterns develop. The paintings have become less restricted in gesture, perhaps even more passionate (which, however, relates back to the expressive- abstract works from the early 1990s). Viewers just have to study a small section of a recent painting and compare it with older works. They will be surprised by their similarity and recognize the clearly linear artistic development.
Colour is the one prime element for Oran, and has always been at the basis of his work. The atmospheric character of the colouring is the same today as in the past. Recently he has been making more use of the line as a graphic element added to the painting. At the beginning of his career, Oran used to do a lot of drawing. He used charcoal to create figurative studies and sketches. And then, even before he started with painting, he created his first abstract works on paper sized approximately 100 by 200cm. They are not unlike the paintings he has produced recently, many years later. Graphic elements – including Arabic letters, seen purely as icons – have often played a role in Oran’s art and have now become one of the most striking elements in the new paintings. By scratching lines on the canvas, the artist has succeeded in transferring elements of drawing to the medium of painting. Oran draws on the canvas – without charcoal or pencil, the lines are already there and all he needs to do is expose them.
Ultimately, it is the great sense of immediacy, directness and intensity which instils the paintings of Ahmet Oran with such expressive power and quality. The contrast between the monochrome or illusionistic surface and the intensely colourful opened parts charges the paintings with energy and gives them incredible presence. Oran shares a very intense art experience with us. He permits us to partake of his passionate reverence for painting. It seems fitting to conclude by quoting the words of Paul Cézanne: “That which makes a painter great is the character which he gives to everything he touches, the spark, the movement, the passion, for there is clarity even in passion.”
Günther Oberhollenzer
Küratör, Essl Müzesi, Klosterneuburg / Viyana
Translation: Susanne Watzek