Intellect Solo Sculpture Exhibition, Gallery Fine Art Moscow, April-May 2021
WITHOUT WORDS… INTELLECTUAL PURSUIT OF AHMET YİĞİDER
Curator: Timofey Smirnov, Editor: Valeria Kotiukh
It is brave and interesting when an artist combines two art forms in his oeuvre, and this is what Ahmet Yiğider does. His versatile creativity plunges into industrial design, monumentality and aesthetics of delicate plasticity and the round sculpture forms and even such sensorial fields as the “scent”. Creatively independent the most the artist seems to be when working on the easel sculpture.
Ahmet Yiğider’s creative method is a silent dialogue about the technological progress’ impact on human life, and the ecologic problems, civilizational processes, and abilities of human mind and intellect.
At first glance, Ahmet Yiğider is in search of a form and strives to think in material and get closer to its essence. His search for the form is focused on the primaeval emblematic and symbolic system, sculptural language, and the expressivity of the ancient civilizations’ sculpture. At the same time, his oeuvre succeeds from the modernist tradition longing to express the thought in the form of a generalizing symbol, visually pointed and ambiguous simultaneously.
Ahmet Yiğider’s personality is clearly visual through the prism of impact of the modern design trends and refer- ence to the early 20th century sculpture – the artist is attracted by expression and dynamics adherent to the pictural art and materials’ structure that may both seem the means and target of his creative pursuit. Meanwhile the very lying beyond the form may characterize the artist as a “plastics philosopher”. Still the statics of images, composed of reality’s minor details and fragments, combined with plastic expression creates a powerful effect of transformation from fractured reality to a symbolic merger.
Needs to mention the artist’s pointed straightening of the visual range to build a consecutive seriality. This kind of prudence drives the viewer away from the works metaphoric and semantic interpretation into direction of comprehending an entire and peculiar “monument to the moment” deriving in the end. As such, without resort- ing to extra verbal means the artist demonstrates the symbols and characters hidden in real life and engages the viewer into his intellectual pursuit. That is the way his philosophy appears to be, silent and deep…
INTELLECT
Ahmet Yiğider
We are at the pinnacle of the pace of progress that has created basis for the development of humanity and the change of the world. As for us, this is not a privilege of living the present, of course. This pace of development has increased throughout the history of human being and will accelerate evermore if there is no unexpected destruction.
Today’s societies bear witness to another important phenomenon besides the usual effects brought about by the natural flow of history and the pace of change: Although the cumulative knowledge we have enables us to have more control over nature and matter, and to better comprehend macro and micro universe, the average levels of awareness, thinking, responsibility and virtue of human beings today (regardless of minorities that can be considered as the standard deviation of societies) can only be considered as a disgrace.
This potential that I question can undoubtedly be understood in conjunction with “the progress and instruments that is expected to have been taught by history to humanity”. If we ignore this influence, in other words, the “time factor”, the ignorance and incompetence we experience today can easily compete with ritual human sacrifices in Carthaginian, Etruscan or Celtic societies, and with many other diaries of shame in history. Or when the decorative lights of our brilliant civilization go out, is it not a much deeper obscurity than the darkness of primitive societies or the middle ages? What’s more, after a number of centuries when we are proud of pluralistic and participatory social administrative tendencies; we are facing another modern and unique disease called populism that swallows, hypnotizes and comforts the masses…
The first propositions of “INTELLECT” series I started in 2017 consisted of the formal redefinitions, postural and relational experiments on the knuckles isolated from the amorphous and complex forms which I sought out in nature, especially from dead tree masses. Although I embarked on a new quest in terms of concept and content, apart from the context of scale they can be regarded as the continuation of my previous works on the “macro movement and universe” theme in terms of technique and style.
Representative examples of head and anatomy anomalies that are reflections of all the reflexes that stand against and defy “INTELLECT”, populism with its mission to justify itself with its own crafty method using “headcount” factor, the hegemony of any community over free thought, selfishness, shallow thinking (which cannot be deepened no matter how many million times being multiplied), our loneliness, our very loneliness were the vanishing point of these experiments.
The state of consciousness that generates the second phase of “INTELLECT” was inspired by the search of combining the struggle for existence and anatomy of the Reasonable Creature with a single conceptual and formal language. This quest, which leads to the “DETRACTIVE ANATOMIES” series, is improved by the desire to purify anatomical lines from many of the common and regular distinctive elements, to reach the deepest point expected to depict existence, to search for a new imagery and visual expression in the negative spaces created through this point that bless the limbs of seeing and thinking .
