Ekrem Yalcindag: from color to color

Initially, the repertoire of various colour and form modules forms the basis of his rectangular canvases. A network of abstracted forms covers the surface, as it were, and individual fields are filled with oil paint, whereby Yalcindag approaches the vocabulary of abstractly shaped, stylised flower elements and thus reveals a tactile painting in the sense of a structure that is partly ornamental and partly floral. This structural formation of the colour surfaces divided by patterns articulates the visual roots of the artist, who grew up in Turkey and continues them repetitively as painted patterns. The artist realises this system in series and as large murals. Last but not least, the titles chosen for these works derive from the compositions based on monochrome colour, which, as two-dimensional colour nuances, are also subject to this structure and are thus brought to the fore as ‘colour as colour’ and repeated inexhaustibly in their fullest variation. Loosely based on Gilles Deleuze, the sameness and otherness of both colour and form in Yalcindag's works are set in relation to each other through ‘difference and repetition’.

In his polychrome disc paintings, the artist uses a similar system: the wooden tondi, covered with canvas, are subjected to a structure, starting from the centre, ring by ring. The design of the individual circular rings is either straight or wavy and always concentric, whereby each ring is modelled in relief-like colour with a fine brush, little by little, drop by drop, over weeks and sometimes months. The impasto application of colour also gives the rings a kind of painted texture.