ESER GÜNDÜZ

In this series, Eser Gündüz’s field of work revolves around the evolutions regarding his personal view of nature and city not as a binary opposition but as a complementary couple. Grey is crucial in the shift, frequently pejorative, a colour that often indicates brutalism, industrialism and shades of pollution, suggesting dirt, melancholia, sadness, monotony and finally the city, urban life.

Recently moved to rural France (Provence) after years in big cities, Gunduz enunciates in his recent works the impossibility of refinding the nostalgic conception of a certain “nature” that we could yet barely trace back to classical art. The nature of today can only be described by itself -with all “good” and “bad”- still there, resisting despite the violent and constant leaks of urban life. The earth has a new habitat: nuclear reactors hidden in the landscape, old factory chimneys taken by ivies, industrial smoke scattered in the blue sky, pipes in the middle of woods, barrages, mines, wastes, and traces of humankind.

for many, a depressive sad contemporary world although the word itself is ancient (it comes from the Germanic grau) and it has an underrecognized double symbolism that has been established and survived through the centuries; unlike the modern perception, at the end of the Middle Ages, as mentioned in the poem of Charles d'Orléans, entitled "The Grey of Hope", the grey was seen at that time as the opposite of black, a symbol of hope and happiness. Gunduz comes close to that idea of hope:

"Living in nature has changed my whole relationship with it. Before, nature for me was just an idealised romantic landscape that I saw through the car window, that I drove past. When I realised that this was not the truth, when I witnessed that nature recreates itself over and over again despite mankind, when I saw the grey in it, I thought that this was the harbinger of a new aesthetic, at least for me! The world, with its good and bad, will always remain worth painting."

Eser Gündüz | This is a grey world, nothing good happens here

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ESER GÜNDÜZ | THIS IS A GREY WORLD, NOTHING GOOD HAPPENS HERE: London

Eser Gündüz | This is a grey world, nothing good happens here

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Eser Gündüz | This is a grey world, nothing good happens here

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