Banu Birecikligil

Flirting Behind the Front-line

Burhan Kum 2005

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“To find strange” is one of the common verbs of art and science. Abnormal situations fall within their sphere of interest. Indeed, if there were no strange difference between appearance and essence, neither would exist. Their weakness, which refuses to accept any treatment for examining all kinds of deviation, is the fundamental condition of the existence of science and art. While scientists seek the causes of deviation, artists contemplate the contradictory images and ‘strange’ feelings that result from it.

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Banu Birecikligil's painting develops on these contradictory images, but it does not stop there. The development process itself is a series of contradictions: colours screaming right next to a hazy caution, the last painted backgrounds, impossible situations, structural breakdowns and others... There are two important elements that manage to hold this chaos together. The first is the sharp irony imbued in Banu's painting. I would like to draw your attention to the subtle difference between irony and dark humour here. Thanks to this sense of irony, she leaves the canvas before finishing her paintings. The final word has been said in what is ‘finished’. Banu, however, leaves her final word to time. Time is an internal element in these paintings. Images of childhood and family photographs meet on the same plane as the advertisements and disaster photographs that bombard us every day. Memory and prophecy are articulated in the same tense. Yet, how can we explain the feeling of Weltschmerz seeping through the paint, implying that the paintings were painted just before they were hung?

 

The paint has dried, but the effect it leaves lingers on us. Paint is the instrument of crime. We too are now tainted by the crime.

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This “just before” state is also felt in the manner of painting. The fresh spirit of the paintings' creation is still before us. Banu applies the ‘beyond bad’ paint that most painters want to present under the guise of indifference, just as much as is needed. Being able to use sound to emphasise a point is a sign of skill. The artist is skilled. What draws me to these paintings is that the hand that produced them is neither ashamed of its skill nor completely reliant on it. We can also note this as the second element that holds the disorder in her paintings together. Indifference has not even touched these paintings. Banu records. She records. With one difference: she records what belongs to the general, the detail filtered through the gauze of thought. The passive past becomes active in the presence of today.

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Why must art nurture beauty, its most insidious enemy, within itself? Is there anyone among us who has not fallen for the lure of this trap? The most desirable beauty sprouts in the detail, or rather, in the essence. I hope that Banu, in her pursuit of this essence, towards the singularity of detail, will not fall into the trap of beauty.