What is Good, What is Evil?
Kaleemat Art Gallery
Gombrich disproves the comments on Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” at his collected work “Meaning Problem at Picture” delicately. This work of art had been associated to creation or heaven for a long time
The questions asked about this work of art were answered when the missing piece was found. The missing piece was Noah’s ark. And when the ark was put back into its place, it came to the light that the work of art was not describing the heaven but the moment before the flood. Bosch was not praising the creation, but he brought up the questioning of human morals to surface, he transformed his work of art to a lecture of ethics
Good and bad must be the first concepts questioned by the mankind. These two concepts are the result of realizing and knowing when we overreach the memorized ethical judgements. Beyond this, it is the deep pain, adoption, and contrast of the realization of not only the other but related to self .
Sema Maşkılı questioned the good and bad with her work of arts at this exhibition one more time with her unique style, looking from external and internal perspective, including herself
Her figures are placed on undefined places exhibit the narrative wanders between knowing and realizing and the expressions wanders between of fear, anxiety, despair, confusion.
Maşkılı forms her own iconography with the art fiction even though she highlights figures in her compositions. She is searching the way of possiblities of allegorical expression rebuilding again in her art work after the art works of classical era encountered often as Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights”
These eerie figures contains two opposite concepts like good and bad, stoping by the way stations reflect their own contradictions with being in both outside and inside the space.
The light and dark in the background, the transitions, the block colors show up all of a sudden, uncertain landscapes while balancing the composition, at the opposite, transform into the symbol of the world slipping away under our feet after a while.
They are outside, because they are becoming the representation of identities of who are far away from where they are, have no belonging and in the world of their own.
While Sema Maşkılı gathers the style of plastic and expressionism together, she is also opening doorways to possibilities about interpretations.
She leaves the audience unanswered in their eternal odyssey. In other saying, finding the missing piece is up to questioner and searcher eyes.
Just one final footnote: The missing piece in Bosch’s art was tactile, concrete and it fit, the search in depts of mind is still the question...
Nilgün Yüksel ,
October,2016