“Imagine an egg on a table, it has rolled and come to the edge of the table and it is about to fall down. You know what happens if it falls down. I freeze this moment not letting the egg fall, draw the moment just before the falling, and show it to you.”
“I do not feel like having to draw every day, but I do not feel good in the times I do not draw or at least think about drawing.”
Selçuk Demirel/Boyut December 1984
After seven long years, Selçuk Demirel will be showing his drawings at İstanbul Galeri Nev’s venue located in the Mısır Apartment. The show, which opens on December 4th, brings together over fifty works grouped under the name Yüzde Yüz (meaning both “hundred percent” as well as “face on face”). Although these drawings vary thematically from one another, they all eventually deal with the usual questions Selçuk seeks answers to such as “We are particles of what?, Where does the body end?, Why are chips mindless?, What is the difference between circulation and dance?”.(*) He pushes the viewer to ponder upon questions that he refers to as “vital things”, such as “Why, when everybody is celebrating the legendary communication culture, we are imprisoned in a world of deaf, mutes and blinds”.(**) Like Ignacio Ramonet has stated: “basically Selçuk’s oeuvre is a deep reflection on the tragic feeling of life that calls upon a political consideration”.
Selçuk Demirel met with a a lot of artists and writers after settling down in Paris in 1978. He built strong friendships with Abidin Dino, Yüksel Arslan, Roland Topor and John Berger. He discovered artists such as Saul Steinberg, André François, Georg Grosz and Alfred Kubin through whose works he realized the artistic value of his of drawings, and through his own drawings he came to understand that it was the most natural and poetic way for him to express his own thoughts and feelings. “Violence and poetry engage with one another in such a calm and harmonious way in Selçuk’s drawings that if we are not careful enough this very uncommon combination might appear to us as almost natural.” (**)
(*)John Berger 2002,
(**) Ignacio Ramonet 1994
