Fatih Kızılcan’s solo exhibition “R | L,” following his “Monoton-Monochrome” show at Maçka Art Gallery, invites viewers to reflect on the differences and convergence between the right and left hemispheres of the brain.

René Descartes (1596–1650) stated, “All our organs are paired, so our brain must be paired as well.” Long before anatomical studies confirmed it, he anticipated the right-left brain distinction that we frequently discuss today. Before we even realized it, the left brain had already established dominance over the older right brain—through writing, speaking, and naming.

Metaphorically, as Fatih Kızılcan explains: “The left brain moves straight ahead. The right brain spreads out. While the left brain moves quickly toward the target, it must abstract and summarize everything. To it, anything with four legs is a chair. The type of wood or the century it comes from doesn’t matter. A chair has no smell. When sitting on it, it doesn’t even notice; its attention goes to the numbers on the screen. Soon, even the rustle of paper fades away. It doesn’t waste time writing letters; it sends emails or WhatsApp messages to the person sitting across, the beloved it meets there… The sound of the pen on paper, the smell of the beloved—it’s absent. Without smell, there’s no emotion.”

Kızılcan’s works stand out not through traditional canvas-brush or paper-drawing relationships, but via a depiction technique rooted in early 20th-century psychological Gestalt theory. Working by erasing on a dark background, he conceptually adheres to Gestalt principles such as “Emergence,” “Reification,” “Multistability,” and “Invariance,” believing that this approach brings his mental images to life and allows easier access to them. “When erasing, say we start from the brightest spot, erasing a figure’s forehead. At that moment, the eyebrows begin to emerge naturally. Like brushing away soil in an archaeological dig, familiar faces appear from underneath.”

Since the start of his artistic career in 1997, Kızılcan has held nearly 30 solo exhibitions in Istanbul, Izmir, Ankara, and other institutions and fairs. In his new works at Maçka Art Gallery, he presents the conditions and states that contemporary humans experience in response to various social and psychological pressures, through critical, figurative, expressive, and fantastical compositions.

January 16 – February 17, 2024