As the city’s art spaces reveal their final shows of the season, Pera Museum opens two simultaneous shows: an extensive retrospective on the neglected modernist painter İhsan Cemal Karaburçak and a group show titled ‘Fundamentally Human’ featuring seven contemporary artists who marry art with science in their works. Representing completely diverse schools of thought and techniques prevalent in different eras, these two shows speak to each other in a dimension not so readily available to the viewer: art is a product of human nature.

Naive Colorscapes

A rare figure in the history of Turkish modern art, İhsan Cemal Karaburçak is a naive artist who managed to stand against the conventions of the era in which he lived and to create an oeuvre that is unmistakably characteristic and unique.

Born in 1898 in Istanbul, İhsan Cemal grew up in the bleak years of the two world wars.  He studied to become a civil servant at the Directorate of Telegraph Services in Ankara, with a mission to build telegraph poles all over Anatolia. As he climbed up the career ladder at his office, he was transferred to a post in Paris, where he decided to take up painting. It was there in 1930 that he signed up for a drawing class at the prestigious École Universelle.  However, he soon quit as he became disillusioned with the conventional methods the school tried to impose on him. He wanted to intentionally ignore the rules of classical perspective, just like Cézanne had done at the turn of the 20th century, and set out to explore the modernist school of thought on his own. He kept on painting and in the 1950s opened an art gallery in Ankara and published his musings on art as pamphlets.  He also exhibited regularly in Turkey and abroad, becoming a well-known artist who was celebrated for his distinctive style.

As you enter the show at the Pera Museum’s fifth floor, you will immediately notice his style and use of color, with the abundance of color in the small canvases hung all around the gallery. İhsan Cemal’s portraits, still lifes, landscapes, cityscapes, and later abstractions all focus on certain colors, such as the combination of orange and green, and the ever dominant dark purple, inspired by Ankara’s clear nightfalls and admittedly reflecting the painter’s moody temperament: “I am a painter of color. Since the sun kills all the colors, I may be inclined to like nature more when it grows dark -when clouds accumulate, or the earth, the trees, and the buildings are bathed in rain, allowing colors to emerge. I must be selecting dark shades for I am charmed by the lights drifting through or the illumination that appears underneath. Perhaps it is a question of a pessimistic or melancholic disposition or nature, who knows? Yet, whatever the reasons may be, since I attain satisfactory results and create art for art’s sake, I am happy with my art, and by extension, with my life.”

It is interesting to witness İhsan Cemal’s progress, from his early flower still lifes to semi-abstracted cityscapes and finally to complete abstractions, filled with the traces of imagery from previous figurative periods. In this transformed pictorial language of his later years, he abandons perspective and aims to paint “a two-dimensional picture on a two-dimensional canvas.” Reminiscent of Klee’s color blocks, İhsan Cemal creates his signature untitled paintings that feature basic shapes to replace his earlier favorite figures: rectangular blocks as houses, circles as trees, Ts as telegraph poles, Cs as curving streets and several colored suns and moons. Considering his profession, the experts speak of instances of Morse code embedded within his canvases but what the artist meant by the little dots of color on the pictorial surface remains a mystery.

Unexpected Aesthetics of Neuroscience

The third floor of the Pera Museum hosts an interesting show put together by the Director of New York’s Schools of Visual Art Suzanne Anker. A digital artist herself, Anker brought together six leading artists who incorporate scientific methods with different media in the visual arts. Leonel Moura, Michael Rees, Michael Joaquin Grey, Andrew Carnie, Rona Pondick, and Frank Gillette have all worked with new technologies ranging from robotics, 3-D scanning, Photoshop, rapid prototyping, microscopy, and computational video.

Walking around the airy white gallery space of the museum’s third floor made me feel as if I was in a science fiction movie, possibly in the art gallery of an alien spaceship. A circular robot with wheels and a blackboard marker buzzed around inside an open display cabinet, writing words on a stack of white drawing paper. Eerie hydra-like parachutes hung from the ceiling and small, clear sculptures that look like molecular bodies sat comfortably on white pedestals. A giant, silvery skull smiled at me from inside a large photograph on the wall.

At the press conference, Anker based the starting point of the exhibiton on the theory of metaphors by linguist Beorge Lakoff.  A professor at the University of California-Berkeley since the 1970s, Lakoff has argued that metaphors are not linguistic but conceptual constructions, and are central to the development of thought. By approaching art, thinking about and interacting with art, we construct certain metaphors in our minds and this actually affects our nervous system in a very physical way. I was very much surprised to find out that recent research shows the evolution of the human brain began with the discovery of figurative sculpture. This means that as we continue to read, write, think, and create, we increase our potential to be smarter and more creative.

This theory is illustrated in the show by Andrew Carnie’s wonderful slide-show installation titled ‘Magic Forest’ (1992). Set in a dark backroom at a not-so-convenient corner of the gallery, the slide-show begins with an image of a skull. A growing brain inside the skull produces an increasing number of neurons and tree-like structures of different colors and shapes. The colors come from the flourescent dyes used in the analysis of the brain tissue under a laser confocal microscope. The neurons, projected over several layers of tulle, create a feeling of depth and an unexpected state of tranquility in the viewer. Who would have thought looking at images of brain activity would be so mesmerizing?

Here, it is impossible to miss the “Tree of Life” imagery in the nervous system.  Perhaps this is why New York artist Rona Pondick put her own head as the single fruit of a steel tree that resembles a neuron. Described as “an alchemical forest” by curator Joe Houston, Pondick’s half-human, half-plant trees are a metaphor for growth, both physical and personal.

Michael Rees, a conceptual artist focusing on rapid prototyping technology, is exhibiting his latest Ajna sculptures. This is a remarkable series in which he combines skulls with uteri and vertebrae among other internal organs. Almost recreating the mythological ‘uroboros’, the image of a serpent eating its own tail, Rees makes an allusion to the notion of death and rebirth with this series. In a book called ‘Information arts: intersections of art, science, and technology’ by Stephen Wilson, Rees uses this unique technology to create these organic-looking resin sculptures.  He compares this technology to “what the medieval alchemists call the Albedo state, the silvery mercurial state where one thing can reflect or become another as easily as not.” The prototyped resin gives the sculptures a tactile quality, which suggests the possibility of growing or reconstructing real body organs with the latest advances in technology.

Moving away from biology on to artificial intelligence, the most playful work on the show is definitely Leonel Moura’s ‘artbot’ ISU Poetics. Named after the Romanian poet Isidore Isou, the founder of the Dadaist Arts movement Lettrism (a movement where the letter is basis of a new art form), ISU is a fascinating four-wheeled robot, which can draw letters and make words to create pictorial compositions. As the robot moves around writing his poetry comprised of simple words, Mr. Moura explains to me that there is no single algorhythm to tell ISU what to do. ISU reacts to color. The color of drawing on a sheet of paper is picked up by its sensors and it makes its own decisions to draw or to stop – unless led on by a stimulus. Moura managed to have ISU draw a human figure by placing it on a clear plexiglass panel with the same drawing. While the artbot struggled with the contours of the figure at the beginning, in time it became quite proficient. The three drawings on the wall prove that the resulting image is in fact more than satisfactory. Later that week, Moura took on a bolder position in his Istanbul Manifesto performance at Galata Perform by saying, “Marcel Duchamp’s idea was to make art with the already made. Our idea is to make art that makes art. […] The great artist of tomorrow will not be human.” Perhaps this may be true. Just as we know that we can see brain activity or move a cursor on a computer with our eyes, what seems like science fiction now may become reality. But still the fact remains that pondering about human nature has allowed scientists and artists alike to get to where we are now.