PLAYING-IN-BETWEEN-THE LIMITS OF THE INTERNAL AND THE EXTERNAL

Homo Ludens -The Playing Human- confines his/her reality to the limits of his/her own body and populates his/her subjective reality with anime characters. Absolute nature attributed to the bodies by the artist minimize expressionistic sways, while we witness the suspension of the dynamic movement. Sinan Demirtaş’s paintings demonstrate the sparkles of a mind oscillating between childhood and adulthood, and move the viewer to a sublime level with their metaphysical depth. 

  

Sinan Demirtaş provides the viewer with the opportunity to take part in a mutual gaze by turning the confines of the canvas into the limitations of the movement of the body. The framing of the photograph sensed by the viewer is moved to an obtrusive closeness with the help of an aggrandizer. The bodies shot by Demirtaş are placed in glass boxes and exposed to light to the extent that they became transparent and melted in the light. This sense results in relaxation of our bodies. The metaphysical space between the whiteness and emptiness does not carry the bodies, but grabs hold on them in order to be seen. Bodies choose to stay in between the eternity and the moment by holding on to their own existence in a cosmos of light, where emptiness is objectified.     

Bodies generating their own language in whiteness, which is the symbol for light and the maximum color, are also actors playing an indefinite space. These paintings, in which we witness the transformation of playfulness to a grift relationship between bodies, demonstrate a transcendent contact between bodies and space.

Play is a cultural and anthropological phenomenon. Painting is a play with its own rules and has a ritualistic quality just like other disciplines of art. Oscillating between hyper-realism and photo-realism, Demirtaş’s paintings are distinct in the way they constantly remind us that they are paintings in spite of their optic realism. First of all, by representing the real and creating means to perceive life, mimesis brings out the most archaic state of art as a play. 

The second part of the play is spiritual. The artist depicts her own daughters, who are more than mere models. By employing his own daughters, who are either reflections of his own identity or childhood, the artist goes on a search to confront himself. At this point the play turns into a reflection on the multiplication of the self. An adult’s journey back to his/her own childhood provides indications of a psychic play. Demirtaş’s latest paintings draw a correlation between the corporal movement and play, while

The bond between the corporal movement and play, manifested in Demirtaş’s paintings, indicate maturing and settling even though it is attributed to childhood.    

The abstract clash between the external and the internal is evident in bodily movements pushing the limits of the canvas. The mentioned gap between the external and the internal develops a buffer zone, where isolation and purification results in the search for a new kind of humanism. When childhood is considered to be a protected period of time, it develops into an impulse that feeds the projection of the act of suspending time. In his book The Open, Giorgio Agamben states that “The anthropological machine of humanism is an ironic apparatus that verifies the absence of a nature proper to Homo, holding him suspended between a celestial and a terrestrial nature, between animal and human—and, thus, his being always less and more than himself.” and adds “The humanist discovery of man is the discovery that he lacks himself, the discovery of his irremediable lack of dignitas.” This archetypal emphasis suffices to highlight the distinction between the human and the animal. However it is also apparent that without the play human would have been at a loss.

Being suspended in time in the buffer zone dividing internal from the external, where humanity would discover itself again between human and animal, should be a play, just like it is represented as in Demirtaş’s paintings.

–Ümit İnatçı