Secil Erel, contemplates on intuition and employs the method of chance in her solo exhibition entitled A Separated Reality. The collection of works are outcomes of a transition that she has been through personally and professionally. The series are results of mediations on a wide array of themes, while the compositions rise on the encounters she swam through during her journey. Through these paintings, she attempts and steps into another world of realm, her layers gain dimensions, her compositions gain curves and at times figures. Her abstraction tenses into a figuration while her compositions burst into abstractions. It is a fine balance, and a talented act to keep both vital forces in equilibrium.

The wisdom of painting, as she names it, starts and ends with equanimity: a healthy distance to be enwrapped with colour, enchanted by light and calmed by the clarity of acceptance. Erel’s inquiry into the unknown, embracing not-knowing as a trait to her urgency for production, is a demanding battle. Through which, her use of colour, her sense of light and construction of multi-dimensionality on a two-dimensional space of expression, is remarkable. Her use of expanded canvas, utilizing more than three panels into an installation, is almost a compulsory act for the manifestation of her truth. Erel’s meditations of concepts she has adhered to her paintings, her expansion of the use of form, resonate with Ancient Eastern philosophies and the wisdoms collated through spiritual experience. However,

the exhibition does not only rise on the theological threads of knowing, but also the scientific inquiry that aids human kind to engage with and elucidate the essence of life through observation of forms and patterns.

To produce means subtraction, in order to multiply again. Every loss comes with pain, as every lack substantiates its ruptured growth. Through losing, one gains space to add on the new, however never as a substitute. Creation does not stand for a chain of formalising replacements for what is left behind, on the contrary it is an initiation of the unthought.

To think anew, one needs unlearning. To give anew, one needs ability to receive. The prosperity brought by understanding and welcoming the birth/death/rebirth cycle, diversifies the initial thought, the intent into a constellation of outcomes.

Secil Erel’s works surface as the outcomes of an extensive road that has been travelled, with dignity and faith, through hardships and confusions. A Seperated Reality is the crystallisation of her acceptance, of what it is, how it is and why it is, with ‘all that there is’ infused with her surrender in the flow of things.

Fatoş Üstek