Thesaurus

The conceptualisation of an image takes precedence over the image itself in Leylâ Gediz’ paintings. Ideas and concepts initiate the artist’s working process, with their origins often in her own past, her childhood and memories, or objects that recall these to the present. Interested in questions concerning the materiality of painting, its association with time, and its place in our lives, she often incorporates into her artistic process the spaces where she produces and displays her works, as well as giving form to her painting within three-dimensional spaces.

Three of Gediz’s works in the Arter Collection are from the time she was a student in the 1990s, when her adventure with painting was just beginning. As its title implies, "Thesaurus" is a diptych that examines the effort to create convergence, sameness and correspondence between the image and its representation through the multiple layers of meaning, medium, memory and time. While one part of the piece is enamel on canvas, to its left is a same-sized photograph Gediz took before finishing the work. The photograph is a frozen document of the production process, reminding the work of its own past; while the painting, gazing over its shoulder at its neighbour, seems to be reflecting on what it once was. The two parts of the diptych look very similar, yet they are different; and despite being incompatible, they are still very much the same. Gediz simultaneously contemplates the temporalities of the two different mediums of photography and painting, and reveals the layers of the work which oscillate between the before and after. The bunny ears that dreamily emerge from the darkness on both sides remain blurred between an object transported from childhood memories and a popular image from the adult world.