DEFNE TESAL, TALKING WITH WATER: PİLEVNELİ | DOLAPDERE

Routine is a condition of survival.

-Flannery O’Connor

"When time loses all rhythm, when it dissipates into the open without any hold or direction, then all right or good time also disappears," writes Byung-Chul Han in his book The Scent of Time.[1] Today, in a world order that keeps us from feeling the sense of ‘presence’, in which we are held back from even perceiving the space we occupy in the void, and from sensing the rhythm of our bodies, the excitement of a new day is always postponed until later as time slips away. The constant endorsement of experiencing, being active, and embracing busyness presses down on us like a heavy burden of responsibilities, like a massive rock from which we cannot escape. While this may be the case for the majority who choose to adapt to the system – or unconsciously find themselves in it – art, perhaps as one of the few fields that can intervene in the flow of time, still has the potential not to succumb to it. Thanks to its inherent demand for reflection, creativity and concentration, and its freedom to be produced without being squeezed into a certain time zone between day and night, art is perhaps able to offer the artists a more generous way of experiencing time.

Defne Tesal is one of the artists who has been dealing with time, the moment, the past and the future since the beginning of her production. In her own time, which she protects with rituals and routines, she tries to create gaps in the flow, spaces that can be opened and inhabited and that can move away from definitions such as yesterday-today-tomorrow and instead attuning to the rhythm of nature, the body, and the mind. The reason her works are often described as calm, serene and fluid, lies the urge to open up new spaces that she can explore with the material, with a repetition of the rhythmic unity and regular, cumulative arrangement of ‘things’. While opening up these spaces, she actually creates a certain movement pattern by staying within the boundaries of her body and space from the starting point. While repetition is a method of concentration for both the artist and the viewer, in Deleuze's words, an obsessive concentration on repetition allows one to find exciting small differences[2]. With all these movements, back and forth, up and down, hard or soft, cyclical or linear, Defne is in fact focusing not on the perfection of her lines, dots, stains or stitches, but on the vibration, the movement and the behaviour of the pieces in their journey to reach the whole, allowing her hand or the material to give her unexpected surprises. Just as verticals and horizontals constantly meet in our lives, she brings together the horizontals, which represent linear time, and the verticals, which reflect our inner relationship with this journey, by maintaining a gentle balance in her movements and traces. In this process of developing a behaviour, the body always takes centre stage with its actions, environmental interaction, and with what it touches and shapes.

Defne's new exhibition, Talking with Water, in which her daily rituals are embodied in her works, brings together three different series of works produced with some basic gestures, following her previous body of work. These works allow us to witness the delicate details of the repetitions she makes by moving around her body softly and calmly, without forcing what is physically possible, and to settle in her time for a while.

I Go Down to the Shore[3]

I go down to the shore in the morning

and depending on the hour the waves

are rolling in or moving out,

and I say, oh, I am miserable,

what shall-

What should I do?  And the sea says

in its lovely voice:

Excuse me, I have work to do.

-Mary Oliver

Defne has been going to the seaside every day for the last year, looking at the sea, being affected by it, listening to it and talking to it.[4] Even though the water changes every moment, it is always there and always in its own state. Perhaps she admires this state of being without doing, of effortlessly standing still or gently undulating. Her series of canvases and sculptures, which develop in parallel with her seaside routine, turn into visual notes of her relationship with water and its healing dialogue. In her own words, she tries to create moments in her paintings where the eye wanders, where reality blurs, where one can be isolated from the environment for a while. As she fills the canvas surface with repetitive, drop-like brushstrokes, she reflects the impressions left by the changing colours throughout the day, the alternating atmospheres of darkness and light, the direction of the wind, the muddying or clarifying water. While creating these landscapes, she first paints the canvas area and covers it with short lines arranged one after the other from left to right like lines, creating a grid-like base. Choosing her colours from the paint mixtures she tries on small canvas cloths, which can also be called notebooks, she adds layers of colour one on top of the other until the surface of the painting exhibits a vibration. The various compositions, sometimes more blurred and matt, sometimes more vivid and clear, are perceived with different textures and dimensions depending on the distance and angle of our body. In the works, which enliven our field of vision by turning the fallibility potential of the eye into an advantage, Defne fills the space within the boundaries given to her by the canvas, while her back-and-forth and horizontal-vertical movements create a stirring, sparkle and rhythm within the stasis, just like in nature. Similar to how rituals make people more connected and resilient as they are repeated, the finger-sized brushstrokes also assert their presence more consistently and decisively as they are repeated. From a distance, we can perceive the effect of waves and currents, reflections and radiations, and as we get closer, we discover a system in which we can distinguish from the integrity of the skin to the detail of the texture, from the arrangement of the pore to the organization of cells. While the optical play of colour fields invites us to a bodily movement like the artist, the moments when our eyes are caught in the particles and lost in the intensity allow us to wander freely in the gaps of time. The calm dominance of blues, greens and aqua tones gives way to different textures and colours turning pink, orange, and disrupting the rhythm of blue in a couple of paintings. Thus, in the work titled I want to be like you, Defne, through her touches, seems to transition from the sea’s radiance to the texture of the body, from the transparency of water to the opacity of the skin. The colours of water and skin blend into each other.

Among the two-dimensional artworks on display, in addition to the large and medium-sized canvases, there is also the eleven-piece For a Moment series. These tiny canvas surfaces create their rhythm this time by emphasizing the presence of space, as opposed to the large works that are filled from end to end. The particles are again finger-sized, but they appear with fewer and more subdued colours within a blue-grey palette, resembling variations of reflections on the sea’s surface. By reducing the fullness and subtracting pieces, the traces in these simplified micro squares encourage us to follow their movements as if reading a musical score, encouraging us to concentrate to keep up with their rhythms as they are lined up side by side on the surface.

“Oneselves”: Creating Bodies that Embrace Emptiness

In the display, Defne Tesal’s canvases are accompanied by amorphous sculptures in light earth or dark skin tones, derived from the natural colour of the jute plant. The desire to explore the potential of a material by focusing on it, this time by winding the threads in a cyclical way, allows them to rise with the rhythm created by the knots that hold them together. While defining each of them as indescribable, genderless, species-less and category-less bodies, she also expresses that they reflect her own daily moods. This time, there is a form in which a repetition that starts horizontally meets vertically in the process of winding, where the body moves not according to the surface as on canvas, but the mass behaves according to the body and moves towards it. The posture of the hand, its mutual position with the material, its proximity or distance to it gives Oneselves’ their shapes. In these works, which Defne also identifies with herself and connects her skin with its texture, the textile material provides her with great flexibility, as in some of her previous works. In fact, textile-weaving, which has a very dense historical weight and symbolic meaning, is freed from the defining burdens of rope-sewing, knotting, and domestically attributed craftsmanship with Defne's use, and gains meaning only as form and texture. These bodies, resembling woven cocoons, have holes left at their ends, as if to allow them to breathe and preserve their own emptiness. Together with the regular imperfections in its texture, this structure evokes a substance like a tough skin that envelops what is inside, protecting it by taking all the damage from the outside on itself. As Defne puts it, each time the connecting thread hooks itself into a place belonging to the past and takes a step forward. The display of the sculptures together on a platform-like elevation, in fact, takes them out of the artist's inner world-studio and daily process, and begins to emphasize their status as works of art; they are finally exhibited together with the canvases, as finished forms that have completed their process of free development in the previous space. Some with their bulging bodies, some with their bent necks or upright postures, some with their shrunken, rounded forms, they continue to breathe together with their shifting centres of gravity.

Arranging and Furnishing Time[5]

Developing the body-material relationship as a result of vertical, horizontal and circular movements, settling into the space of nature, built space, surface or area, filling or emptying it, all the while listening to it by capturing its own rhythm. Defne Tesal is actually trying to make this rhythm perceptible for the viewer through different senses, and most of all palpable. This feeling, which belongs entirely to the essence, the inner world and existence, makes art not an exaggerated process and makes us forget the anxiety of creating a work. Defne's almost equating her art with her ordinary experiences, positioning the material as an extension of her body and living with it for certain periods of time ensures that her works never lose their sincerity and are not drowned under big words. She engages in a friendly struggle with the situations she feels she cannot control; the hurry, speed, chaos, by regulating time and preventing it from slipping away. The tiny secrets of the minor differences we see in the repetition of her works at the show keep her excitement alive. As something is repeated, it begins to exist, and its existence transforms it into something new each time. It's like the joy of discovering the various 'selves' within us in the same rhythm of each new day. Neither nature nor the body likes sudden changes, it seeks slowness and calmness even in the differences. Defne, by turning to herself each new day, by doing similar things with slight variations, by incorporating the characteristics and rhythm of nature into her body, spreads into the void with the flexibility and serenity she deserves.