“In Boyacı [Painter], Yağız Özgen deconstructs his artistic practice into layers and proceeds to making a careful analysis of each layer. In this installation, each component of the practice of painting is given individual attention: The applied materials are deconstructed into their elements, while the painter as artist and as craftsman emerge as a conjoined identity, across the spectrum of art and craft. Initially exhibited at SANATORIUM in September 2023, the project was reshaped during the Cité Internationale des Arts residency programme, in which Özgen participated in the spring of 2024. And it was reimagined in the context of the historical building Barın Han that housed the Critical Shifts exhibition, which opened in October 2024.
This publication offers a deconstruction of the installation and detailed analysis of its layers through textual narration and design, reflecting Özgen’s approach in his original work Boyacı. An Paenhuysen focuses on the dualities whose thresholds are blurred in Özgen’s Boyacı, portraying the project as a cyclical journey. Oğuz Karayemiş offers an epistemological analysis, attempting to address the questions raised and issues problematized in the work. Elvin Eroğlu contributes with a poem, in which she conjures a world parallel to the one imagined by Özgen, reflecting on the story of Borges transforming the Sahara Desert. Contributing as the designer, Umut Altıntaş replicates and reflects the ethos of Boyacı in the structuring of this publication, mirroring the intimate relationship between reality and fancy, reminding us that an exhibition space is itself a construct. The symmetry established between used and unused space in the installation is reconstructed on page.”
