Interview: Gökhun Baltacı’s U.S. Debut at kaufmann repetto
Fall in New York is big for shows, and with so much on offer, it’s easy to gravitate toward established names. Collectors, however, have flocked instead to the U.S. debut of one of the most compelling painters to emerge recently from Turkey: Gökhun Baltacı, now showing with kaufmann repetto in Tribeca. The nearly sold-out show confirms the universal resonance of his subtle, subconscious-driven compositions, which capture the very essence of the human psyche, unfiltered, through a genuine symbolic language.
The works in “A Moonless Plateau” draw us into nebulous, enclosed spaces populated by isolated objects, blurred still lifes in which the familiarity of everyday things grows unsettling within the powdery atmospheres from which they emerge. The unstable, vibrating quality of their dense surfaces suggests a dust-laden temporality, a space of meditation and contemplation that has more to do with inner than outer space, much like Morandi’s iconic compositions of bottles and vases.
Baltacı’s visual lexicon has long been anchored in the mundanity of everyday life, yet it reaches for the psychological, almost metaphysical essence that defines the layers of our existential experience. When we speak after the opening, he describes the works as “cousins” of his earlier pieces. They share what he calls a “velvety atmosphere,” a texture that comes from the nature of oil pastel and that implies a different temporality in these grainy images.
Baltacı’s work is defined by a weighty painterliness, which he achieves with a medium that lets him move between dense, almost tactile textiles and delicate atmospheric effects. “Pastel has a unique quality. And we get along well,” he tells Observer.
As a student, Baltacı experimented with almost every medium before settling on pastels. “I didn’t start using them until after I graduated,” he says. “To arrive at the right color, you apply many different colors and blend them together on the paper.” That process rules out working directly from a sketch. Instead, these thickly layered pictorial fields are the result of a progressive stratification of emotional and imaginative levels of the subconscious as it finds a fleeting, ever-changing form on paper. “I start with an idea in my head that I’m half-convinced by and half-skeptical of. Then the idea changes as the process unfolds. If an idea comes to my mind, I initially might see it as a modest one; the painting’s own process leads you to much grander, indescribable ideas.” Working with pastels—erasing, scraping and layering—is a tense process, he adds.
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“A Moonless Plateau“ |
Baltacı’s works belong to another time and space, a sedimented temporality far removed from the accelerated rhythms of contemporary metropolitan life. “City life has never interested me. I keep to myself, unfortunately,” he admits. The painted matter becomes a sensitive surface, a repository of duration and memory as much as an expansive, unstable psychological and emotional field.
While these works keep some figurative anchors, they read more like a coded language that, if not fully abstract, functions much like a musical composition. “Music holds immense, indescribable significance in my life,” Baltacı says, noting how music has gradually found its way into his paintings. He points to the cassettes that appear in several works in the show. “They’re untitled—they consist solely of color; they are cassettes of color. I suppose memory plays along with these cassettes.”
In this sense, Baltacı’s paintings become memory boxes where the subconscious can manifest in a language that precedes any codification, closer to affect than to articulated thought. They are animated by the same evocative tension between memory and imagination that music alone can trigger in such an abstract, fluid way, activating an emotional response that precedes any rational process of meaning-making. The pastel marks are intuitive, psychic traces of memory landing on the surface, constantly reworked, resurfaced and elaborated through the process of painting. “Memory feels like an intimate, misty room,” Baltacı reflects. Memory is problematic, he continues; it isn’t real and depends on the viewer’s interpretation.
As Baltacı approaches it, art making is an exercise in symbolization and signification that plays out as a continuous dialogue, or better, a dialectical tension, between conscious and subconscious expression, intuition and rationalization. “When the painting is finished, the earlier scratches and alterations still persist within it. It’s like something we remember in our memory,” he says. “Perhaps my painting rests in this balance. My paintings do not point to anything specific; they imply, and that implication extends into infinity.”
While Baltacı usually worked in monochrome, for this exhibition he adopted a palette made exclusively of grays. “Perhaps this is the influence of Paris,” he says when asked about the choice. “I’ve just moved here, and the dominant colors of the city are gray and beige. I think these have affected me.” He moved after the situation in Turkey became too difficult, if not dangerous, for him. Growing up in the capital, Ankara, he belonged to a generation that tried to resist the direction the country was taking. While studying at Hacettepe University, he co-founded the Avareler street-art collective, which staged guerrilla interventions in public spaces, a chapter that feels far removed from the increasingly intimate, psychological turn of his work today.
“Avareler was wonderful. Those good old bad days,” Baltacı replies when asked how that period still informs his practice. “We did a lot of street art during our college years. We had reached the end of the group’s own dynamics,” he says, explaining that his focus then began to shift toward pastels and his own narrative.
“I miss Ankara. It had a huge effect on me; the main dynamic of my art probably still comes from there. But I’m changing, and I can feel it. This change will be reflected in my art,” he says, acknowledging how quickly things have shifted and how adrift he still feels. “We’ll see where the current takes me. I’ve stepped outside my comfort zone. Now I’m trying to focus on my new adventure.”
These works convey both nostalgia and a broader spatial and temporal suspension, as if they occupied a liminal space that mirrors Baltacı’s own emotional state. That condition resonates more widely, too, particularly with those who feel similarly adrift—far from home and from their roots, moving through an increasingly mobile and polarized world that leaves little room for sustained dialogue with the self.
This is precisely the kind of space Baltacı’s painting opens, both for him in the act of making and for the viewer in the act of looking. His works are powerful because of their weight, which imposes a slower tempo of contemplation and meditation, resisting the accelerated consumption of the digital scroll. Through their material and psychological presence, they reclaim a different kind of emotional attention—one capable of moving beyond the individual toward a more universal resonance, capturing the broader feeling of an age of disruption in which both our emotional and imaginative capacities are increasingly under threat.
