Kemal Seyhan
Kemal Seyhan
In his abstract paintings, Kemal Seyhan highlights the act of painting. He takes the canvas as a two-dimensional space where it is possible to express himself with layers of vertical and horizontal spatula strikes. Seyhan stays out of the endless debates about “the end of painting,” rejecting a figurative symbolic language. Painting, he emphasizes, is about seeing. It is independent from literature, graphics, and illustration. For Seyhan, painting is an autonomous activity.
The distinctive characteristics of Seyhan’s paintings are the colors he uses and the spatula marks aligned on a coordinate system made of fine transparent layers. The artist creates the sense of depth with the empty spaces that are left among the multiple layers, setting these physical strata as a time-space. Seyhan’s work is a process, a situation generated by stratified timeframes. It is the time itself. Beyond its historic-cultural designation, time is not based on an ordinary fiction but produced within the act of painting itself. He takes his colors from nature and the physical environment he lives in. The artist questions the painting itself, not as a state of mind or an emotional state of being.
Kemal Seyhan was born in Kayseri, Turkey in 1960. After beginning coursework in sociology at Boğaziçi University, he settled in Vienna, where he studied philosophy and art history at Vienna University. He later graduated from the Department of Painting and Graphics at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. After living in Vienna for over 20 years, the artist moved back to Istanbul. Seyhan has been living and working in Istanbul since 2004.
In his abstract paintings, Kemal Seyhan highlights the act of painting. He takes the canvas as a two-dimensional space where it is possible to express himself with layers of vertical and horizontal spatula strikes. Seyhan stays out of the endless debates about “the end of painting,” rejecting a figurative symbolic language. Painting, he emphasizes, is about seeing. It is independent from literature, graphics, and illustration. For Seyhan, painting is an autonomous activity.
The distinctive characteristics of Seyhan’s paintings are the colors he uses and the spatula marks aligned on a coordinate system made of fine transparent layers. The artist creates the sense of depth with the empty spaces that are left among the multiple layers, setting these physical strata as a time-space. Seyhan’s work is a process, a situation generated by stratified timeframes. It is the time itself. Beyond its historic-cultural designation, time is not based on an ordinary fiction but produced within the act of painting itself. He takes his colors from nature and the physical environment he lives in. The artist questions the painting itself, not as a state of mind or an emotional state of being.
Kemal Seyhan was born in Kayseri, Turkey in 1960. After beginning coursework in sociology at Boğaziçi University, he settled in Vienna, where he studied philosophy and art history at Vienna University. He later graduated from the Department of Painting and Graphics at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. After living in Vienna for over 20 years, the artist moved back to Istanbul. Seyhan has been living and working in Istanbul since 2004.