ciao capo, sono squalo, 2020: a reading in seven lenses
Acrylic on canvas, 65 × 90 cm (25 ⅝ × 35 ⅜ in). Painting by Yiğit Özen.
At a Glance
The pointed teeth ranged in the open mouth of the figure on the left stand as the one sharp edge within the softness of the rest of the painting. The title gives this mouth a sentence: hello boss, I am the shark. An Italian and overly cheerful greeting, the opening line of someone introducing himself as a predator. The figure opposite has turned its head away, standing in profile, its face indistinct. One shouts, the other does not listen; this mismatch between the two stances is the nerve centre of the scene. Even the shouting figure's eyes are closed, two thin slits; the gaze is withdrawn, only the showing remains, the threat flung into the void. The speaking party is forced to exaggerate itself because a hundred others could be found in its place; the pointed tooth is not a threat but marketing material. The real weight gathers on the silent side.
Both bodies are built by heaping egg-shaped bubbles one upon another, no skeleton, no inner structure visible to hold the mass together. The one that speaks so boldly and the one that keeps silent both issue from the same loose fabric; the only difference between them is where they stand. Each bubble is blue on one side and pink on the other, two colours taken onto the two edges of the brush and laid in a single pull, the mixing happening not on the palette but directly on the surface. So the bodies are of an indeterminate temperature, as if perpetually trembling. The sacs on the belly of the left figure clump and hang down, a heap resembling an animal's udder; the right one is thinner, its sacs ranged along the back at almost equal intervals. Two different rhythms side by side.
In the feet the painting's real hardness comes out. All four feet have turned into claws, the toes elongated, their tips as though driven into the ground; the aggression that could not be held in the face has come down to lodge at the point of contact. These do not walk, they grip the ground. The ground too splits in two, white and bright on the left, on the right a dark vertical band begins and swallows one leg of the right figure, where it ends not visible. A body half seen, half swallowed. From two metres two people stand; nearing one metre the bodies scatter, and in hand there remains only some hundred curved strokes side by side. This method of heaping cells recalls Dubuffet's net, yet does not resemble his interlocking pieces; the lumps here overlap, the ground seeps between them, in places it is left half finished. Not a system, an accumulation.
Form and Composition
As the tops of the two heads press against the top edge, the dark void between them narrows at chest level and sets up an hourglass. The large loose units on the left and the small disciplined series on the right bring two separate rhythms, and the dark band on the right edge pushes that figure inward, making a balance of spilling on the left and compression on the right.
The tops of both heads touch the top edge, with no gap left between. The crop compresses the figures from above and, below, leaves a white strip of ground at the bottom. This strip is about a sixth of the painting and is the only horizontal force. The feet press onto this strip, the toes spread, the points of contact wide. Above there is compression, below freedom.
The mass on the left is broader. Its base is about two and a half feet wide, and its body, growing to the left, sticks to the left edge. The one on the right is narrower and more upright; it stands in profile, its face looking left. The distance between them is narrowest at chest level, opens a little at head level, and narrows again at foot level. The gap between, in other words, works like an hourglass. The inside of this void is a flat, dark fill; no unit enters it.
The bodies are built by stacking round units one on top of another. In the left figure these units are large and loose, their arrangement irregular; the largest gather in the middle of the body and shrink as they descend. In the right figure the same units are smaller and more disciplined, making an almost evenly spaced series along the line of the back. Two different rhythms stand side by side. The left figure's legs can be counted as four, and the distances between them are not equal; the rightmost leg has come forward and stands alone in the lower central region.
The contour is broken everywhere. The outer line is not a single line but a jagged boundary formed by the overlapping of the edges of the units. For this reason the silhouette is not fixed but changes according to where one looks. The distinction between figure and ground collapses on the back of the right figure; there the dark vertical band sticks to the edge of the mass and it is uncertain where it ends. In the left figure, on the other hand, the distinction is clear, the light mass standing against the dark ground.
The head regions work differently from the bodies. In both the strokes are shorter, more multidirectional and more jumbled. In the left head, at mouth level, sharp-tipped short units make a series; these are the painting's only sharp toothed edge. The right head has no such sharpness; there the mass softens and gives a projection towards the back. There is no third unit at the edges in a spectator position; the painting makes do with two masses and the scale hierarchy stays single-tiered. In the lower right, on top of the white strip, a small mark stands, its scale that of a toe. The dark vertical band on the right edge is about an eighth of the painting in width and descends uninterrupted from top to bottom. Its edge is not straight, making an inward indentation in the middle. This band pushes the right figure inward and makes room for the left figure. On the left edge there is no such boundary, and there the mass stands as if it would spill straight off the canvas. In the end the construction of the two sides is different: on the left spilling, on the right compression. The eye's path rises from the white strip where the feet spread, slows at the large units in the left body, jumps right at head level and, following the right figure's back series downward, descends to where it began.
Colour and Light
Each bubble is cobalt on one side and candy pink on the other, and because they are set side by side without mixing the bodies look as though they are trembling. Because the maroon of the ground is dirtied with grey, the red of the same family in the figures stays alive, and the black band along the right edge swallows one side of the body and leaves the other sharp against the wall.
Both bodies are built from the same four paints: cobalt blue, light candy pink, fire red and white. Each of the bubbles is blue on one side and pink on the other; the colours are set side by side, not mixed into one another. Within a single bubble two different warmths stand at the same time, and because of this the bodies look as though they are constantly trembling. The brush passed swiftly while wet, and at the edges, where the blue and the pink meet, there has been a thin purple smearing, but only in a few places. The ground is a dusty maroon. Laid with vertical scrubs, the cloth beneath shows with its coarse weave, and grey has got into the colour. It is of the same family as the red in the figures but dirtier by a clear margin; a brick with its saturation lowered. This difference on its own keeps the red of the figures alive. Had the same red been laid clean the bodies would have stuck to the wall.
At the right edge there is a vertical black band. Its width is about a hand-span, its upper part denser, and it opens downwards into a grey black. That is the depth of the surface. The arm and the leg of the figure on the right enter into this band and the edge line disappears; that side of the body is fed into the darkness, while the other side stays sharp against the maroon wall. The same body ends in two different ways against two different grounds. The ground along the lower edge is between ice blue and white. It looks like the cobalt in the figures lightened with a great deal of white, and so the feet and the floor are of the same family and the boundary between them is weak. At the tips of the toes there are pink and red strokes; without them the feet would have merged entirely into the ground. The lightest place of the surface is here too, rising in the lower left corner almost to raw white.
There is no direction from which the light comes. The white is placed on each bubble from the same side, its upper left; this repetition gives the surface an artificial roundness, not a real illumination. Nowhere is there a cast shadow; the dark lines have been used only to separate the bubbles from one another, and they too are not black but like a mixture of navy and brown. The colour arrangement in the heads thins out as one descends towards the lower part of the bodies. At the top the red and the white are thick and dense, while in the legs the paint thins, the blue is left on its own, and the maroon of the ground comes in between. In the lower region the pink is almost used up.
The warmth balance stands right in the middle. There is as much pink as blue, as much red as pink; none defeats another. Because of this the bodies resemble a flesh of indeterminate heat, more a surface where water and paint have mixed. In the mouth of the figure on the left there is a small terracotta patch and white teeth, and that red is the most saturated point in the painting. At the lower right, on top of the black, there stands a mark of two letters, only half a register lighter than its ground.
Iconography, Myth and Title
The left-hand figure showing its teeth enacts the predator applying to the boss, because giving a greeting here is not a threat but a gesture of joining the queue. The difference between the sated body and the body whose ribs can be counted sets up the hierarchy before the mouth, and the partition of light and shadow announces in advance who will be called to account.
Two figures stand, and between them there is a distance of about an arm's length. The one on the left faces us; its mouth is open, sharp teeth lined up inside the opening, and on the two sides of its head there are protrusions like horns or ears. The one on the right is seen from the side, its head bent forward, its face almost entirely hidden. Both of their bodies are built from swollen masses lined up side by side, and at their feet long claws spread across the ground. Neither looks in the same direction.
The title is a sentence of greeting. Someone addressing the boss introduces themselves and says they are a shark. The owner of this sentence is most likely the one on the left, because the speaking mouth is on it. The shark, in common speech and in crime narratives, is shorthand for the predator; to introduce oneself this way is not a threat but an application. The predator who wishes to join the queue comes before the boss and shows its teeth. The right-hand figure's bent head makes it either the boss or the next victim; both roles are shown with the same posture, because in the hierarchy the one above does not look either, and the one who submits does not look either. Who gives the greeting is determined by the distance in the scene; the one standing two steps back is always the one waiting.
The teeth are the clearest mark of this scene. The mouth is drawn in a different language from the rest of the body; while the masses soften, the lines there sharpen. In the tales the showing of the teeth is the opening of identity, the moment the wolf casts off its skin. Here the skin is not cast off, only the mouth opens and the interior is shown. The right-hand figure's mouth is not visible; and this says that the speaking is one-sided. A closed mouth, in the tales, shows either consent or helplessness.
One must pay attention to the ground, because the two do not seem to stand in the same place. The one on the left is on a white area, the one on the right at the edge of a dark strip. The background is red on the left and turns to black toward the right. This division recalls that simple partition that separates the parties in courtroom and altar paintings: the one standing in the light and the one drawn into shadow. The right-hand figure has half entered the black area, part of its body already merged into the darkness. This partition between light and shadow announces in advance who will be called to account.
The state of the feet completes the scene. The claws spread wide to the front, the nails separated from one another. These are not human feet; they are closer to the description of a bird's or a reptile's claw. That is, the speaking is human, the body animal. The gathering of these two in the same figure carries the old distinction between guise and nature into the scene. The masses on the left figure's chest grow downward and reach their largest at the level of the belly; it stands like a sated body. The one on the right is thinner, its ribs lined up side by side in a way that shows them. The difference between the one who gives the greeting and the one who receives it is set up in the body before the mouth. The sated body and the body whose ribs can be counted tell, without words, how the queue works.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
The left figure, its jaw split apart and shooting out sharp protrusions, has its eyes closed and its gaze withdrawn; with no one opposite it, the threat is flung into the void. The aggression that could not be held in the face has descended into four claws and driven into the ground, while half of the silent right figure appears to enter the dark band and be swallowed.
The left figure's jaw has split apart and sharp protrusions have shot out from the gap. Its eyes, meanwhile, seem closed, in the form of two thin slits. Someone baring their teeth normally looks as well; here the gaze has been withdrawn, and only the baring remains. The threat is thus flung into the void. There is no one opposite it, because the right figure has turned its face away, standing in profile, its head fallen forward. One shouts, the other does not listen. This mismatch between the two is the painting's nerve centre. The folds above the left figure's head are flung outward, like hair or feathers. The movement of shouting has not stayed in the mouth, it has spread around the head as well.
Both bodies are built from egg-shaped swellings piled on top of one another. No muscle, no skeleton, no dense tissue; there are sacs leaning against one another. Such a body could fall apart at any moment, because no inner structure holding it together is visible. It is as if it would come to pieces at a touch. The distrust felt towards the body's wholeness has here passed into the form itself. The sacs on the left figure's belly cluster and hang down, forming a heap resembling an animal's udder, filling out the underside of the body. Some of these swellings have been left as hollow rings, others filled in. In the same body, full and empty regions stand side by side.
Looking carefully at the feet, I find the painting's real hardness there. All four feet have turned into claws, the toes lengthened, their tips sharpened, as if driven into the ground. The aggression that could not be held in the face has come down and settled at the point of contact. These figures do not walk, they cling to the ground. The right figure's hands are also down, stuck to its body, reaching for nothing. The two bodies do not look at one another but are forced to share the same ground. The length of the toes has exceeded that of the fingers; the lower part is more developed than the upper.
The right figure's head is almost sunk into its shoulders. There is not even a trace of a mouth on its face, only a round protrusion. This silence gave me more to think about than the left figure's shout. We cannot know what the silent party is thinking, and because we do not know, we can load everything onto it. Where the anger goes remains uncertain. The silent party's body is more orderly; its sacs are lined up in a row, not scattered. The one making a sound stands scattered, the one making none stands collected.
The ground is white and bright on the left, and on the right a dark vertical band begins. One half of the right figure enters into that darkness. Half of it is visible, half swallowed. A body in the act of departing, or the remaining half of a body that has already departed. The red surface behind stands the same way over both of them, holding the two figures within a single setting. They cannot separate. Nor can they stand facing one another. The gap between them is about a step; they have neither moved apart nor drawn closer.
Society, Power and Technology
The sharp teeth of the figure that calls itself a shark are not a threat but marketing, because a worker for whom a hundred others can be found in his place is forced to exaggerate his character to prove his difference. The only thing separating the two bodies that come out of the same bubble tissue is where each stands, and the side that hurries and comes early turns out to be the side below.
The figure on the left has its mouth open, its teeth jutting out sharp, its head stretched forward. The one on the right has turned its head away, its face cannot even be made out. The one who speaks and the one who does not listen. Job interviews, promotion talks, the two-minute chances caught in a corridor are all built upon these two stances. One is obliged to explain himself, the other is under no obligation to hear what is explained. It is also clear who set the distance between them; the one on the right has not taken a step, the one on the left has reached across.
Calling yourself a shark is the language of a period. Be aggressive, be the one who chases, if you stop you sink. There is a work culture that teaches people to present themselves as beasts of prey, and the reason for this is not that anyone is really a predator but, on the contrary, that everyone is easily replaceable. A worker for whom a hundred others can be found in his place is forced to exaggerate his character to prove his difference. The sharp teeth are marketing material here, not a threat. The real threat is on the side that stands quietly. This too must be added: the language of predation separates a person from his colleague. If the man at the next desk is your rival, the two of you cannot claim your rights at the same time. Against whom you bare your sharp teeth also determines whose interest it serves.
Both bodies are built from bubbles, from rounds set one on top of another. Neither has a firm skeleton. That is, the side that speaks so assertively and the one across from it have both come out of the same loose tissue. Looking at a company hierarchy from outside, one sees this: the person who is the boss has no special tissue, only the place he stands is different. But where you stand determines everything. Of two men from the same dough, one fills in the assessment form, the other waits for the result of that form.
The ground is divided in two. Where the one on the left stands is lit, behind the one on the right it goes off into darkness. The right-hand one's feet are also splayed forward like claws, spread wide on the ground. Their ways of holding on are different. One stands upright to show himself, the other stands at ease because he already knows he will not lose his place. The real balance of power on an office floor is not visible in the payroll, it is visible in who is in a hurry. The side in a hurry is always the side below. The person who comes early to the meeting, answers the message at once, picks up the phone even on holiday, supposes himself hard-working; in fact he is announcing how weak his position is.
The greeting in the title is Italian and too cheerful. Hello boss, I am a shark. To be able to form this sentence a person must first package himself like a product; then he must himself believe the epithet on the packaging. Whether someone who presents himself like this for years one day really becomes so, or merely wears out, the picture does not say. What it does say is this: the mouths of both figures are up above, the rest of them below, and the feet of both are sunk into the same ground.
Art History and Comparison
Whereas Dubuffet's Hourloupe cells lock together, the lumps here overlap without locking, the ground seeps between them; what emerges is not a system but an accumulation. Whereas the Siyah Kalem demons build every feather with a separate line, this pair of figures is made by piling up, and although the fragmentation spoils the anatomy it does not spoil the stance on the ground.
The creature on the left grins, baring its teeth, while the one on the right stands in profile and has turned its face towards the other. The body of each is built from top to bottom out of lumps; look for a leg and we see five or six balloons stacked one on another, look for a belly and we see a cluster. The feet are large, the fingers spread like claws. The most stubborn defender of this way of building a body, that is, of building it not as a single mass but as the sum of small interlocking cells, was Dubuffet in the history of painting; in his Hourloupe period he turned all objects, people and furniture into the same network of cells. But in Dubuffet the cells are uniform, closed and flat; they lock together like puzzle pieces. The lumps here do not lock together, they overlap, the ground seeps between them, and in places they are left half-finished. Not a system, but an accumulation.
The two figures standing side by side, upright, naked, call up another template. As in Cranach's Âdem ile Havva panels in the Northern Renaissance, the two-figure composition proposes a comparison; one looks at the other, and there is an exchange between them. Here too there seems to be an exchange, the one on the right has turned its head to the left, but the gaze of the one on the left does not go to it. The grin is turned towards the void. The title is in Italian and forms a sentence of greeting; the two beings in the painting, however, are frozen right in the middle of the greeting, as though the voice of one had not reached the other.
To my mind the closest relative of this pair is not in Western painting. The demons on the album leaves attributed to Mehmed Siyah Kalem also stand like this, upright, in pairs, large-clawed and baring their teeth. The difference between them is the direction of the technique. In Siyah Kalem every feather, every claw is described with a separate line, the creature is constructed by drawing; here the line appears only at the edge of the lumps, and even that is left by the brush's own edge. That is, one makes a monster by describing, the other by piling up.
Within the series' 2020 group this canvas is one of the clearest examples of the cell method. In the works of the year before, the body was still at times drawn as a complete anatomy; here that wholeness has been given up, the body wholly broken into its units. What is interesting is that the rise in the number of units does not scatter the figure. Both beings stand upright, press on the ground, look in one direction. That is, the fragmentation has not spoiled the meaning, it has only spoiled the anatomy.
There is also this: both figures end at the same height, the head of each is pressed against the upper edge, the feet stand on the light strip at the lower edge. To fit an upright pair of figures to the height of the canvas is close to the logic of the niche statues on medieval church façades; there the saints too are lengthened or shortened according to the narrow recess allotted to them. In this canvas the lengthening has been done through the legs, the bubbles arranged, thinned downward. The black strip behind the figure on the right comes down to the edge of the canvas and there swallows one of the figure's legs; where that leg ends cannot be seen.
Material, Gesture and the Viewer's Experience
Blue was taken on one edge of the brush and white on the other and laid down in a single pull, the mixing happening not on the palette but on the surface, only along the thin line where the two strips touched. The black contours passing over the patches slip off the edge, and the red gap between them says the line was flung after the patch and faster.
I cannot finish counting the places where two paints were taken up on the brush at once. In almost all of those egg-shaped patches building the bodies, blue and white run side by side, without mixing, as two separate strips. This can only happen when you take blue on one edge of the brush and white on the other and lay them down in a single pull. The mixing happened not on the palette but directly on the surface and only along the thin line where they touched. One end of the patches begins thick, the other end ends by thinning; the brush was set down by being pressed and lifted as it was pulled away.
Each patch is a separate move and none of them was returned to. On the belly of the left figure I count more than twenty, all in the same direction, sloped from upper left to lower right. This is the natural arc of the wrist of a right-handed person. Between them thin gaps have been left where the ground seeps through, unfilled. After drying, black contours were passed over them; some of those contours do not sit onto the edge of the patches, they slip a little and a red gap is left between. These slips tell me that the line was flung after the patch and faster.
The burgundy area behind is dragged vertically and thinned. The weave of the canvas reads there from head to toe, the paint clinging to the backs of the loops and not going down into their hollows. In some places you can see a second round scraped off what was beneath, short light nicks left. The black band on the right was laid last; it rides over the burgundy and passed by eating away the edge of the calf of the figure on the right. There the paint is a little thicker, it filled the weave and left a matt, closed surface. The white ground on the lower edge, on the other hand, is the opposite, so thin that the burgundy beneath strikes up here and there as pink.
The toes are the most hurried place in the picture. Each toe is left with a single short push, at its tip the brush's bristles parted and gave a jagged finish. On the left foot of the figure on the right two toes have stuck to each other, not separated, left so. The signature at the lower right corner is flung too with the same fine brush, in a single touch.
A cloth ninety centimetres tall, standing upright. Looked at from two metres, the two bodies become two people standing on their feet. As you come within a metre the bodies fall apart and what is left in your hands is only some hundred curved brushstrokes set side by side. At thirty centimetres you can count the blue and white strips within a single stroke. All three of these distances behave as if a separate work, and none takes the place of another. To the right of the neck of the left figure there is a finger's width of cloth the paint never touched; the primer stands bare there and keeps, just as it is, the gap between two moves.
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