Can Alkor’s book of poetry, published in 2014 under the title Canto CXVIII and conceived as an imagined “ending” to Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, is once again on the agenda years later, this time with a visual counterpart. Painter Kemal Noyan carries the poetic tension of the text onto the plane of painting through the “images” he has produced based on Alkor’s poetic universe.

The exhibition does not propose a complementary relationship between poetry and image; on the contrary, it brings the two disciplines face to face within a field of thought that intersects with and, at times, tears through one another. Taking its title from the associative field evoked by Dante’s line, “I recognize the traces of the ancient flame,” the exhibition aims not so much to claim the writing of an ending as to make visible the traces left behind by an extinguished flame.

An Imagined Ending, A Real Confrontation

Alkor’s Canto CXVIII is not an attempt at “completion” appended to Pound’s unfinished work; it is a language of atonement that reckons with the burden of modernism. The fragility carried by Pound’s late fragments transforms, in Alkor, into an aesthetics of confession. Poetry is no longer a cohesive epic structure; it is the language of a fragmented self, of a belated confrontation.

In this context, Noyan’s paintings, which the artist calls “images,” do not explain the text; rather, they make the crack within it visible. The image here is not representation; it is shadow. Not the object itself, but its reckoning with light.

The Testimony of the Image

Born in Istanbul in 1941, Kemal Noyan has been working in the field of painting for many years. The works in the exhibition reconstruct historical thresholds such as Venice, the Rialto Bridge, and Constantinople not merely as geographical references, but as ethical and metaphysical spaces of transition. The Rialto ceases to be a postcard; it becomes a place of judgment. Constantinople, meanwhile, becomes a symbol of internal disintegration rather than external occupation.

In Noyan’s three-layered compositions, consciousness, memory, and historical burden overlap. Half-human, half-grotesque figures make visible the deformation that ideology leaves on the body. The cross, atonement, and the question of forgiveness do not appear in the paintings as aesthetic motifs; they emerge as an ethical problem left unanswered.

“Why Poets?”

The intellectual background of the exhibition includes not only Pound, but also an intertextual line established with figures such as Dante Alighieri, Anna Akhmatova, Rilke, and Osip Mandelstam. While the voice of poetry multiplies through translation and persona, Pound’s early poem Histrion (1909) assumes a decisive role in the final section. The idea of the “borrowed voice” expressed in Histrion resonates in Alkor’s imagined canto as a poetic destiny: The poet allows the spirits of the past to pass through him for a brief moment; then the flame dies. The image remains.

A Threshold Between Poetry and Image

This exhibition is not an act of homage; it is a space of confrontation. Here, poetry and image do not adorn one another; they sharpen one another. “The Flame Dies, the Image Remains” does not promise a completed meaning. On the contrary, it keeps alive a question wandering through the ashes of modernist utopias: Is forgiveness possible? And can art truly be a language of atonement?