The oil paintings and drawings of Seyyit Bozdoğan

Seyyit Bozdogğan is born in the Anatolian Kozan. The strong, from the inside out shinig colors and the landscape formations of his homeland moulded his individual symbolism of color and his stylistic idiom, which mark today his "body landscapes" and "face landscapes", in which the originally existing unity of humans and landscape become manifest as "nature", lending pictorial expression to their natural and overall simularity: He forms landscapes in analogy to human limbs; bodies and faces appear, enlarged and from close to, like individual, accessible shores. Unmistakably is thereby the analytic, increasing structure of painting, which divides the individual areas into colour fields set hard against each other, which press for abstraction and for autonomy of detail in the micro structure. In this manner, behind the smoothness of the surfaces something else, more actual is made visibel, they appear injured and divided, cut up by an elementary power, so that below them deeper layers, living structures become conceivable, which prevail in a violent outward movement and will be uncovered in tears and crevices through a volcanic, destructive force.
Additionally, the game with the perspective is brought in:
Interior and exterior, room and time permeate each other, dream and reality merge as in the view through a window, out of an imagined interior into an irreal exterior; face cutouts are brought over in close up magnifying glass effects, or distance is generated by means of painted frames and darkend parts of the picture surface; thus by hiding and colluding, discovery and rebellion are aided that the viewer should perform for himself. This manner of painting aims at reality, and/or on cognition over reality - therefore this is changed, alienated, the eye is sensitized, seeing the used one is made more difficult, the viewer again is invited to thinking, 'cognition by travel' and newly discovering. In its youngest pictures emerged in Germany, the relationship between space and human beings wins a new dimension for Bozdoğan as regards content. Under the conditions of the industrialization the natural unity of human beings and landscape is fundamentally disturbed: The latter one, formerly created by himself, faces him strangely and threateningly, technical elements penetrate the picture world and seem to determine the individual, whose seclusion in itself and isolatingness outward finds itself represented in deformation and shortening.

Margot Westlinning, 1987

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