articulo attack on mandarin, 2026: a reading in seven lenses
Acrylic on canvas, 80 × 80 cm (31 ½ × 31 ½ in). Painting by Yiğit Özen.
At a Glance
Winged blue forms are swept from upper left to lower right in a flock; this is the painting's main diagonal, and every unit within it faces the same way, toward the boat below. The brush, loaded with paint and struck while half wet, has been flung in an arc, its bristles splayed to leave separate tracks; no wing was returned to twice, blue and white running side by side within a single stroke without mixing. These patches, descending from ice blue to cobalt, glow the sharper for standing before a charcoal-black ground. The black is flat and matt, a void that gives back no light; there is no direction to fall into it, and it lifts the blue forward by its own phosphorescence. Warm colour is almost absent; the sole escapee is the dirty, greenish-yellow patch on the head of the figure climbing the mast.
At a third of the height from below, a long open boat stretches from left to right, and upon it are ranged small round-headed figures with crosses for eyes; all pull at the oar at the same angle. This orderly rhythm is the opposite of the scattered flock above. One reading takes this concord to be not a shared decision but a tempo imposed from outside; like the drummer over the galley slaves, the one who sets the beat never sits at an oar. The rowers have their backs to the direction they travel, their crossed eyes were not looking ahead to begin with. The two iron anchors at lower left are what truly gives one pause; their chains are taut, and if they are fixed to the bottom then the boat arrives nowhere though it be hauled all night, and moreover it is not apparent that it fails to arrive.
At centre right an articulated figure clings to an upright pole and climbs, resembling a wooden artist's mannequin; its head a small scribble, faceless. It is the most sharply drawn, the only pulled-together presence in the scene. The dominant construction summons Bosch's Ship of Fools, the elongated, trembling bodies summon Greco's late skies, only here there is no sky to reach up to, above there is only black. The word of attack in the title names the target as a holder of office, but the same word is also a species of duck; it wavers between the office to be struck and the bird in the flock. That office-holder is hard to find on the paper; the bodies that stand exposed, upon whom something is about to descend, are the ones at the oars. A name has been written on the boat's flank, the haulers have no name. On the eighty-by-eighty square the flying forms are at face height, the boat and anchors are left where one must stoop to look.
Form and Composition
The light winged forms in a swarm trace the main diagonal descending from the upper left to the right centre, while the row of stocky figures a third of the way up from the bottom sets up the only regular rhythm and becomes the exact opposite of this chaos. The pole to the right of the centre divides the surface, while the dark area in the upper right corner holds the widest void.
Winged forms are swept in a swarm from the upper left down towards the right. This flow is the painting's main diagonal; it traces a broad arc that begins at the top edge and descends to the centre right, and every unit within it faces the same way, down and to the right. These light-value masses emerge by rubbing against the dark ground; their wings are fringed, their edges ragged, none of them has a closing line, and where they do not rub they melt away. The density of the swarm is highest in the upper central region, thins towards the right edge, and the last units are cut off by the crop.
At the right centre an articulated figure clings to a vertical pole. The pole descends from the top edge all the way down, stands a little to the right of the centre, and is the only straight line that divides the surface vertically. The figure's body is fragmented; arm, leg and spine come out as separate segments, and unlike the blurred swarm around it, the joints can be made out here. The dark ground stands unbroken to the right of this figure and in the upper right corner; that is the widest empty area, and no unit enters it.
About a third of the way up from the bottom, a horizontal row is set out. A long light boat form stretches from left to right, with small stocky figures lined up on top of it. Their eyes are marked with crosses, their bodies round, they number about ten and are close to one another in height. The distance between them is nearly equal, about a hand's width; the row spills out past the crop to the right. This row is the painting's only regular rhythm, the exact opposite of the scattered swarm above. The line of the boat divides the surface in two; above, curved chaos, below, a straight row.
The difference in scale is clear here. The large winged masses above and the articulated figure in the centre are big, while the cross-marked-eyed figures below are small; they stand like units watching the goings-on from the edge. Below the line of the boat there is a narrow band of water, into which the tips of slanted parallel oars are driven. These oars are a second series of repetition, all at the same angle and the same interval. In the bottom left two anchors and a chain are drawn onto the surface; the contour here is thin and sharp, the opposite of the swarm's feathery edge.
On the left edge a grey triangular mass points up, with a short spiked projection at its peak; this is the only rising form that stands against the direction the swarm descends in. Its height is close to half the crop, its base leans against the left edge, and behind it stands a second, lower triangular ridge. In the upper left corner thin light arcs and a stick-like shape drawn upside down drift about, weightless, not embedded in the ground. The eye enters from the upper left, follows the diagonal and descends to the pole in the centre, drops down from there and arrives at the horizontal row, slides left along the row and settles at the bottom on the anchors in the lower left.
Colour and Light
The wings between electric blue and ice blue shine as if carrying their own light in front of the coal black, the difference between the black at the very bottom and the white on the backs of the wings drawn out to the extremes. Since the surface turns on cool blue, grey and black, the dirty yellow on the head of the figure climbing the mast remains the only crack that recalls heat.
Wing-shaped patches oscillating between ice blue and electric blue are flung across the upper half, all of them breaking away from the coal black behind them and lunging forward. These blues are not a single register; in some places a light blue close to the sky, in others cobalt, and towards the edges they descend to navy. The paint was laid onto the black while it was wet, its fringes have scattered, and white has slipped through between them. These are the most saturated and the liveliest surfaces; because they stand in front of the black they shine sharper than they otherwise would.
The ground is black throughout, but not a flat black. There are brush marks, it drops to navy here and there, and along the left edge it opens into a leaden grey and curves into the shape of a mountain. This darkness does not behave like a shadow; there is no direction falling into it, only void. As for the blue, it lifts it forward, as if the blue were glowing out of the black. The difference from dark to light is drawn out to the extremes: at the very bottom an almost absolute black, on the backs of the wings a white that resembles it not at all, and the openness between the two keeps the surface taut from end to end.
As one descends into the lower half the blue cools and drops to grey. There are small round-headed figures ranged along the side of a boat; their eyes are crosses, their colours somewhere between dirty white and pale blue, far from the vividness of the wings above. The body of the boat too is grey white, with an inscription run across it in blue letters, that blue a register lighter than the grey around it. At the very bottom the water descends to ultramarine, dark and saturated, with white oar-scratches crossing through it. The two anchors in the lower left corner are pure white, the coolest and cleanest points of the surface; the chain that links them is drawn in the same white, thin and dull. The body of the figure who has grasped the mast and is climbing is a pale blue white, left a few registers lighter than the vivid blue of the wings above.
There is almost no warm colour. The whole of the surface turns within the cool family of blue, grey, black and white, and nothing like skin is to be seen. In most paintings cool colour means distance; here the reverse has happened; the blues come in front of the black, towards the viewer. The only crack is on the head of the figure climbing the tall mast in the centre; there is a dirty yellow patch verging on green there, small and scattered, as if a single drop of warmth had escaped into the cool. Were that fugitive yellow withdrawn, nothing recalling heat would be left on the surface.
The light comes from no external source. The blues carry their own phosphorescence, resembling a night-time glow over the black. The white lines, for their part, have been opened by scratching the paint away; the upside-down figure at the upper left, the hatchings over the mountain and the anchors below are drawn in the same sharp white, as if cut out of the darkness. The signature at the lower right is in that same blue, low enough to touch the dark of the water.
Iconography, Myth and Title
The blue-winged flock descending from the sky falls upon the boat full of travellers like a verdict from above, and the rowers with crosses drawn over their eyes recall the passengers of the raft that ferries the dead. While the first word in the title calls up the threshold of death, the name of the target swings between a holder of office and a duck.
A blue-winged flock plunges into the night; beaks stretched forward, bodies pitching as they descend, feathers scattering behind. Below, on a dark water, a long boat sits, and it is full of small figures. These are round-headed, stocky beings; crosses have been marked over their eyes, their oars have gone down into the water, and they sit in a row. In the middle, clinging to a thin mast, a jointed body climbs upward. On the left, white cliffs rise, and at the tip of the highest peak a small watchman seems to stand. In the upper left corner there is an object hung upside down with forked tips; it dangles its teeth into the void.
The scene holds the moment of a raid. Birds descending from above is the oldest setup for depictions of attack; a flock swarming down from the sky falls upon the boat carrying the travellers. In the tales these birds most often carry news; at times they turn into an army waiting for carrion. This cloud descending upon the rowing crowd calls to mind a verdict coming from above, because judgement always comes down from on high. That small watchman on the peak has seen the raid in advance and has stayed there like a lookout with no one to warn. The gap between the two ends has not yet closed; the beaks have been halted before reaching the boat.
The boat and the row inside it settle onto the story of the raft that carried the dead. The ferryman who takes you to the other shore lets no one aboard without receiving his due; the crosses drawn over the rowers' eyes say that those who have set out on this road left their gaze behind long ago. A name has been written on the flank of the boat; the tradition of naming a ship makes a person out of a rough plank and summons it each time it is named. The figure clinging to the mast in the middle therefore stands apart. The story of the traveller who bound himself to the mast and withstood the seductive voices is right alongside; the danger here is not voice but wing, yet the gesture of clinging is the same.
In the lower corner sit two anchors and a chain. The anchor is one of the oldest signs of hope; the fixed point to hold onto in a storm. Its being placed right beneath the attack, at the spot where it will touch the water, hints that a way out is still open. The word for attack in the title names the target as an official, a holder of office; but the same word is also the name of a species of duck, so the thing meant to be struck moves back and forth between a person of rank and a bird in the flock. The word at the head of the title resembles a formula that calls up the moment of death, that threshold where the last breath is taken; read this way, the attack becomes not a fight but a picture of a final moment. The fork at the upper left resembles the staff of the hand that rules the sea, turned upside down; its handle above, its teeth facing the water. The colour of the water darkens as it descends toward the lower edge, and nothing beyond the point where the oars sink can be made out.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
While the swarm of creatures diving from above takes aim at the boat, the small figures crammed inside it cannot see the coming attack because their eyes have been closed off with crosses. The only whole body in the scene is a faceless jointed puppet; gathering its pieces, it climbs the pole and pulls itself up out of the water.
From the upper half of the darkness a swarm of creatures dives downward. Forms built from blue and white lines, long-beaked, their wings flung out; whether they are birds or fish cannot be told. Their bodies are not distinct, each one left with a few quick strokes, and they seem to come at you before they have had time to take shape. This is how an attack descends anyway, without its source being quite made out, in a mass. Nor are they aimed at a single target; they dive at everything below all at once.
Below, small round-headed figures are lined up in rows inside a boat. Soft, almost armless bodies, resembling snowmen or stuffed toys. Most of them have no eyes drawn; in their place stands a cross. They cannot see the swarm diving at them. Because they are so many in number, they cannot be picked out one by one either, one is not separable from the next, the same figure has been placed side by side over and over. Not being able to see an approaching danger is like a child who closes their eyes in the dark and thinks themselves hidden. One hopes that the thing not seen will pass by. In this scene it does not pass by, it comes down right on top of them.
In the middle, a pale figure clinging to an upright pole climbs upward. Unlike the others, this one's body is jointed; arms, legs, torso in separate pieces, fitted to one another at the moving joints between them. It resembles that wooden model painters use for drawing, a body that can be taken apart and reassembled. It is the only collected, the only moving being in the scene. Its head is nothing but a small scribble, it has no face. Someone who has arranged their pieces back into place but could not complete their head is wrapped around the pole, struggling to climb up out of the water. There is a stick in its hand, and in the hand of another figure below as well; whether it is an oar or a spear cannot be told.
The lower edge is given over entirely to water. A dark blue surface, thin oars emerging from it, a chain wound around the side of the boat and two iron anchors. An anchor exists to bind something to the bottom, to hold it in place; here it seems to carry the weight that pulls downward. There is no boundary between sky and sea, both are the same deep darkness. For this reason the water beneath the boat does not stand like a ground, it stands like an opened void; the full boat barely stays upon it, as though it might be taken in at any moment. From above the swarm descends, from below the water waits. The crowd is pressed right in the middle.
In the upper left corner there is a small drawing turned upside down, made with thin lines; it resembles a fork, and also an inverted body. Far from the noise of the struggle, it has been left hanging at the edge. Throughout all this diving and climbing I could not find two beings looking at one another. The eyes of the swarm cannot be made out, those of the crowd are closed off with crosses. As for the climbing figure, its head has been left empty, it has no face at all. On the side of the boat a word is written in blue letters, the only legible trace in the scene; who says it, and to whom, cannot be told.
Society, Power and Technology
The oarsmen pull in the same instant, but what makes the harmony is not a shared decision, it is a tempo given from outside; this evenness is not organisation, it is obeying a tempo without choosing it. The oarsmen with crosses marked on their eyes sit facing backwards and supply the power but do not see the course; while the anchor is down, pulling until morning takes them nowhere.
Inside a boat there are small figures seated in rows, all pulling at the oars in the same instant. The oars come down into the water, the bodies bent forward at the same angle, not a single hand out of step among them. In place of their eyes crosses have been marked, their heads dropped level with the oar. We see a crowd working together, but how this togetherness was formed determines everything.
Rowing in such harmony is usually taken as a sign of unity. But what makes the harmony here is not a shared decision, it is a tempo given from outside. At the head of the galley convicts a drummer would sit; everyone pulled to that beat, and the one who set the beat never sat at an oar. Seeing bodies that fall so exactly into line with one another, one supposes it to be some kind of organisation, whereas the more the harmony grows the smaller the share of decision that falls to each oarsman. The most smoothly running crew is very often the crew that asks the fewest questions. Keeping step with a tempo is not the same thing as having chosen that tempo.
The oarsmen sit facing backwards, their backs turned to the direction they are going. All the power comes out of them, but they cannot see where they are driving the boat; the course is charted somewhere else. The crosses marked on their eyes complete this, they are not expected to look ahead in any case. Lower down, in the water, two iron anchors sit, their chains taut. This is what actually stopped me. A person may row all night, but if the anchor is down he arrives nowhere, and moreover does not realise he has arrived nowhere, because he is not seated in a direction from which he could see the shore. That labour is real does not mean that labour carries anywhere. Everyone sees that he is working, no one asks where he is going; exhaustion is taken as the proof of effort, and the place reached is left out of account.
Above, something entirely different is happening. A blue, winged flock glides down from the heights, coming towards the boat. A slender figure clinging to a mast climbs upward, and on the left a small one has come out onto the tip of a hill. They are the ones who see the approaching thing first; whoever is up high has a view, whoever is pulling at an oar down below has none. Warning and sight both gather up above, while the danger comes down upon the oarsman who cannot lift his head. Height works here like a privilege; whoever can climb up also seizes the right to see in advance what is going to come down.
The title speaks of an attack, an attack made on a holder of office. On the paper that officeholder is hard to find. The bodies out in the open, the ones something is going to come down upon, are those at the oars; the person named as the target does not even appear in the scene. A name has been written on the side of the boat, the ship's name is clear; of the names of those pulling inside it there are none. The anchor's chain descends towards the bottom of the water and where it is fastened cannot be made out.
Art History and Comparison
Bosch's Deliler Gemisi arrangement has been set up, yet what sin the oarsmen with crosses for eyes carry is not stated; there is an attack, but no judgement behind it. Greco's trembling bodies reaching up to the sky enter here as a bird-assault flung sideways, while the jointed puppet in the middle is the most sharply drawn place in the painting.
From the sky, from the upper right corner down towards the lower left, a flock of blue winged forms glides down; some have sprouted a beak, some are no more than a tuft of feathers, all of them flowing in the same direction, towards the boat below. Inside the boat, small bodies like snowballs are lined up, a cross where each of their eyes should be, reaching oars out into the dark water on either side. A boatful of passengers who have lost their minds, together with the flying creatures that swarm around them, recalls the crowd in Bosch's hell panels; in his Deliler Gemisi too there is a boat, a witless mob inside it, and strange creatures all around. In Bosch every creature is the counterpart of a sin, it is clear where the flock is heading, and in the end a judgement awaits. What failing the oarsmen here represent is not stated; there is an assault, but no tribunal.
The way the winged forms are drawn is close to Greco's late skies. His figures too elongate like this, tremble like flame, waver between blue and grey, lose their gravity and are drawn upward. In Greco this elongation is the sign of a rapture, of an opening onto the heavens; the body is stretched towards a divine direction. In this canvas there is no sky to reach up to, only black stands above. The forms are flung not upward but sideways, not towards a deliverance but towards a raid. The same trembling, melting body has been taken from worship and set down in the middle of a brawl.
To construct a tangled collision taking place at midnight as a horizontal crowd was the business of Japanese war scrolls. In the Heiji scroll the palace raid flows from left to right as a torrent of flame, arrows and horses; the event can be read, one can follow who is attacking whom. In the assault here that legibility has not been sought. The oars cross over the water like a thicket, the birds descend as a cloud, the jointed puppet in the middle clings to a pole and defends itself with a stick; who has gained the upper hand, where the attack began, is uncertain. The scroll narrates an event from beginning to end; here only the noise of the event remains.
While most works in the series set up a single figure at the centre and empty out its surroundings, this canvas works in the opposite direction, filling a scene of incident with a crowd. In the other works dated 2026 too the surface is seen to be worked from end to end; here that fullness has been tied to a sea-fight. The puppet in the middle stands apart from the series' soft bodies built up out of cells; the body this time is made not of round bubbles but of movable joints recalling a wooden mannequin, and that is the most sharply drawn place in the painting. The word written on the hull of the boat, the two anchors at the lower left and the chains tie the scene to a sailor's idiom. The drawing of the anchors, though, holds no boat; it stands on its own at the bottom of the water.
Material, Gesture and the Viewer's Experience
In the blue wings, opened by the loaded brush striking and being flung across the canvas, blue and white are dragged without mixing, their tips scattering strand by strand. The white lines, meanwhile, walk in broken bits over the matt black with a dry brush, and when the blue goes wet on the phone this dryness disappears altogether.
The blue winged forms all came out of a flicking of the brush. Loaded with paint and half wet, the brush struck the canvas and was flung in an arc; its bristles spread in that flinging and left separate marks. At the tip of each wing there are thin strips divided by the bristles, where the paint thins and runs out. Blue and white were carried together within the brush and dragged onto the canvas without mixing; within a single stroke light and dark run side by side. None of these forms was returned to a second time, they were all left in a single move and dried just so.
The black behind is flat and matt, a ground that gives back no light. It was filled with a broad brush in overlapping passes and no brightness is left anywhere in it. At the tips of the blue forms the brush is almost empty; there the blue is no more than a scraping over the black, the place the bristles touched is painted and the place they did not stays dark, so the wing tips separate out strand by strand. The black standing so dull makes every drag of the blue look drier.
The white lines look as if they came from an altogether different hand. They were slid over the black with a thin, nearly dry brush; the paint held only where it was pressed and skipped where the pass was loose, so the lines are not continuous but proceed in broken bits. The three-pronged form at the upper left, the anchors at the lower left, the skeleton clinging to a rope at the centre, are all drawn with the same dry touch. The peaks on the left, meanwhile, are built up by dragging white and grey over each other, almost scraping, layer on layer; the brush was pressed there and the paint, catching and catching on the weave of the canvas, moved on and left a rough surface.
The small bodies in the bottom row are set up with a little brush, in a few touches; the crosses at the eyes are placed by laying two short lines over each other, each one separate. The oars are straight, fast lines coming down in a single pull, their thickness unchanging from start to finish. The water at the bottom is made with horizontal drags, light blue laid over dark blue. The writing on the boat is left in small letters with a fine tip. That long upright line coming down from top to bottom is a single walk; the brush was set down once and descended eighty centimetres without ever lifting, only somewhere in the middle did the hand tremble slightly.
An eighty by eighty square: standing in front of it, its lower edge is at the level of my waist; the boat and anchors at the bottom therefore stay low, in a place you have to bend to look at, while the flying forms above come to the level of my face. To see the square as a whole you have to step three or four paces back, and then a black void opens and the blue hangs within it. As you approach, this hanging breaks down, the rhythm of the hand's striking and flinging comes to the fore, the dryness of the paint becomes visible to the finger. Looking a long while, the eye grows used to the blue and begins to take the black not as a ground but as a real pit. When I open it on the phone the blue goes wet, and the places where the dry brush could not cover the black, where the darkness seeps up from beneath, do not pass to the screen at all.
Back to articulo attack on mandarin
