Ahmet Çerkez’s second solo exhibition, Settling on Earth, can be viewed at Art On İstanbul
between February 8 and March 13, 2021.
In this exhibition, Çerkez centers on humanity’s ability to re-adapt to the earth and rebuild life
after disasters. He approaches painting with the same calm and simple attitude as if beginning
life anew. The works on display feature floating stains on acrylic gradient backgrounds,
accompanied by boundaries and movements traced in pencil.
In sacred texts and folk narratives, disaster stories often describe how life on earth is nearly
wiped out—sometimes by natural forces, sometimes as divine punishment for human actions
—and how a handful of people must rebuild life from scratch. Today’s disaster scenarios,
however, permeate everyday life: they are constantly repeated in the press, on social media, in
the series and films we watch—even at times inciting disaster itself. Humanity seems to need
tragedy in order to begin again. The impulse to restart, to define a new space, to settle and
sustain life in the face of catastrophe is a central theme in Çerkez’s practice. With Settling on
Earth, the artist carries traces of his personal history and the accumulations of his painting
journey into a new pictorial space.
Çerkez channels his reactions—anger and frustration—toward uncontrollable, external
structures of the world order into painting, where he finds purification, simplicity, and
serenity. He suggests that throughout humanity’s settlement on earth, each person also settles
into an inner territory, formed through sometimes harsh, sometimes fragile layers. On the
canvas, he reflects this analogy through observations of nature. By closely observing and
analyzing the organic wholeness revealed by nature over time, Çerkez translates the
projections of these free forms into his paintings with minimal intervention.