remixed execution of lucid drowning, 2019: a reading in seven lenses
Acrylic on canvas, 65 × 90 cm (25 ⅝ × 35 ⅜ in). Painting by Yiğit Özen.
At a Glance
A greenish body is spread horizontally and no border is drawn between it and the blue beneath; where the body ends and where the water begins is unclear. The arms are open, the legs hang, no trace of resistance. Whether it is sinking or swimming, the painting does not say. The ultramarine band at the lower edge is the most saturated colour of the surface, laid on thick and wet, pulling all the weight downward and standing like a surface of water. The stance of a body left in water is known: the standing body carries its weight, the one given to water gives up carrying, its limbs come free. The girl found in the river, the drowned hero, the infant left to the waters are always drawn with this slackness.
The word execution in the title pulls the scene out of accident and ties it to punishment; in trial by water it is the water itself that delivers the verdict, the hand of the one who decides invisible. The word clear, though, is a separate layer; the drowning person sees the situation and does not prevent it, like one who knows he is inside his dream. This is best understood by someone doing the end-of-month reckoning: rent, bill, groceries plain, the table clear, the outcome clear, the man is sinking and he sees it, and seeing is of no use. Because the collapse is slow it is not counted a catastrophe; first the holiday is given up, then meat, then the dentist, and the bottom is nowhere visible. A person, touching the bottom, kicks off it and rises, but if where the bottom is is not known the flailing stretches on indefinitely.
The bodies are painted with an acid green, white mixed in; though there is no light source the green glows, because the white ground beneath works like a light striking it from behind. In the large masses on the right the same green darkens and drops to moss. In the middle a column of black hatching descending from top to bottom is foreign to the surface; while everything is soft, that place is dry, thorny, broken, made by reducing the paint with a stiff-bristled brush, and it splits the body in two. At the edges stands a face apiece; on the left a blue-violet mask, bodiless, a face left behind, on the right a wakeful head, its eyes open, a witness looking at what happens and not intervening. The heaped bodies set up a scene like Géricault's raft, but there each arm could be studied and followed one by one; here there is no arm to follow, there is a heap and no count. One reading counts the two rounds at lower right as the masses before a figure seated in a chair, another eye sees them as the most gathered, clearest forms of the body.
Form and Composition
The dark vertical mass holding the axis descends from the centre and divides the surface in two, leaving a light sprawling heap on the left and a dark compact order on the right. While the crosswise format lays the two bodies head to head and makes their feet meet in the centre, the second vertical mass on the right edge stays without a counterpart and tilts the balance to the right.
Two large roundnesses sit side by side in the lower right quarter. Their diameters equal, their centres on the same line, the distance between them about half a diameter. These are the painting's most compact and clearest forms; everything else is scattered. Beneath the two, short extensions descend and end before reaching the bottom edge. Above them, meanwhile, there is a head, shifted towards the upper right and standing a hand's width in from the edge.
In the centre a dark, vertical mass descends from top to bottom. Its upper tip begins at the half height of the painting, its lower tip enters the lower band. Its width is about a hand and it thins downward. Its surface is hatched with short, hard strokes; its texture entirely separate from the soft patches around it. This mass separates the two sides from each other: on the left a light-value, sprawling heap, on the right a darker and more compact order.
The heap in the left half stretches horizontally. Inside it there are overlapping lobes, all arrayed from the upper left to the lower right and, in total, setting up a slanted line. The topmost lobe is near the top edge, the lowest in the lower central region. At the lower tip there is a round lump; it does not touch the lower boundary of the crop, cut off a finger's width above it. Between the left edge of the heap and the left edge of the canvas a narrow light strip remains.
In the upper left corner a separate face stands. Oval, dark in value and not attached to the body. Its scale is a little smaller than the roundnesses in the lower right. Its position is near the corner and the crop cuts it slightly from the left. On the same line, along the top edge, there are three separate fringed clusters; one a third of the way in from the left, one in the centre, one a third of the way in from the right. All three are of the same texture and all three droop from the top edge. This series gives the upper band a rhythm.
On the bottom edge a dark band passes from left to right. Its height is not constant; thin on the left, thick on the right. This band sets up the painting's base and gathers the scattered order above from below. In the lower left corner there is another fringed cluster, of the same texture as the ones above but larger. The contour is nowhere complete; the forms come out through difference in value, and the distinction collapses especially in the central region, where the light heap touches the dark column. The crosswise format here lays two bodies head to head. The head of the one on the left is in the upper left, the head of the one on the right in the upper right; their feet meet in the centre. That is, the order works not like a mirror but like a strap. On the right edge there is also a second dark, vertical mass, descending from the top edge to the lower band, its width about a hand. That mass closes off the right boundary, with no counterpart on the left edge. The balance is therefore heavy towards the right.
Colour and Light
The ultramarine lower band is the most saturated colour on the surface, and while it pulls the weight downwards the acid green in the bodies shines as if lit from behind, thanks to the white ground that passes through from beneath it. Because the same green mixes with black and descends to moss in the round masses on the right, a single colour stands at two separate weights on the two sides of the painting.
The blue band along the lower edge is the most saturated colour on the surface. Ultramarine, laid thick and wet, rising upwards slice by slice and mixing into white. At its darkest in the lower right corner, on the left it thins and drops to grey. This band pulls the weight of the whole surface downwards; nowhere else is there a colour of this strength. The bodies are painted in an acid green. Between lemon and grass, white mixed into it, in some places light almost to the point of glowing. The paint is laid thin, the white ground beneath passes through it and makes the green brighter still. In the round masses on the right the same green darkens, mixing with black and descending to moss colour. Thus a single green stands at two separate weights on the two sides of the painting.
The pinks are in scattered clusters. Two in the upper band, one at the lower left, one more small one in the centre. Their colour varies between pale rose and fuchsia; none is fully saturated. Green and pink are opposite colours and here both are in a lightened state; and so the tension between them is soft, remaining like a hum. Where they touch, the two paints have mixed while wet and left a dirty beige. The face at the upper left is at an entirely different intensity. It is painted in dark ultramarine and violet purple, with a pale pink ring around it. The highest colour contrast in the upper half is there; in a small area there stands a blue that keeps both its darkness and its saturation, and everything around it stays pale by comparison.
The scribbles on the right side are black and dry. The brush has passed almost paintless, and the pink and white beneath show through the gaps; and so the black is not fully black, it is grey-furred. The vertical black mass in the centre is the same, fraying downwards. These do not do the work of shadow, because none of them sits at the foot of a body. The ground is a mixture of white and light blue. The brush has been scrubbed in every direction, the paint has caught on the weave of the cloth, and at the upper edge the canvas's own colour has been left unpainted as a strip. At the middle left the white is at its cleanest and at the same lightness as the green; there the boundary of the body disappears.
At the navel height of the figure in the centre the white thickens and covers over the green. That is the lightest point of the surface, the paint raised and the ridges left by the brush standing. Just to its right there is a grey blue area, left from the two colours running into one another while wet. There is no light source, but there is brightness. The green shines on its own; the white ground beneath it works like a brightness striking it from behind. In the lower right corner, where the blue and the black overlap, there stands a small signature.
Iconography, Myth and Title
The horizontally laid-out body with its slackened limbs carries the standard posture of the one given to the water, and when the execution in the title binds the scene to trial by water, the hand of the one who passes the verdict stays invisible. The word lucid implies that the drowning one sees the situation and does not prevent it; the face broken off from its body stands like a death mask that looks at what is taking place but does not intervene.
Along the lower edge a dark blue band stretches and opens upward; it stands like the surface of water. On top of it a greenish body is laid out horizontally. The head has slipped to the right, the arms and legs are separated from one another, none of them pressing on anything. At the upper left there is a face standing on its own; blue and pink, its eyes open, its mouth drawn down. On the right there is a second head, green with dark hair; on its face teeth are visible. None of the three heads is turned toward another.
The horizontally laid-out body is the standard image of the one who has stayed in the water. A standing figure carries its weight; a figure given to the water stops carrying and its limbs come loose. The arms and the legs of the body here too have gone slack. The narrative of the girl found in the river, the drowned hero, the baby set adrift on the waters; all are painted with the same posture. Water is the element that kills, it is also the element that carries; the narrative never resolves this contradiction. The slackening of the limbs is the first sign that resistance is over. The body the water carries does not choose its own destination, the decision is left to someone else.
The word execution in the title takes the scene out of accident and binds it to punishment. Practices such as execution by drowning and trial by casting into water occur in old legal narratives; the one who came out of the water was counted guilty and the one who sank innocent, or the exact reverse. Leaving the way of reaching a decision to the water itself removes the responsibility of the one who passes the verdict. In such a verdict the hand of the one who decides is never visible. Whether the body here comes out or not is not clear; it still hangs suspended.
The word lucid, for its part, adds another layer. Being aware of what is happening, like knowing that one is inside a dream. That is, the drowning person sees the situation and does not prevent it. The separate face at the upper left is perhaps the side that carries this awareness; broken off from its body, it looks at what is taking place and does not intervene. To be aware and not prevent is one of the heaviest places in the narrative. The tradition of the death mask is like this too; the face separates from the body and remains as an object. The mask takes the face out of time and fixes it there.
At the upper edge pink clusters float. They stand like flowers, like feathers, like bundles left on the surface of the water. The flowers set adrift in the water at funeral ceremonies give this image. The bundles set adrift continue to float even after the ceremony is over. The dark, vertical mass in the middle, on the other hand, divides the body in two; like a root descending from above or a sunken tree branch. The right head's mouth is open and its teeth visible, while the other two are silent. The colour of the water darkens as it descends and at the lower edge nothing can be made out.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
The green body is spread without a boundary drawn between it and the water beneath it, and the absence of any trace of resistance in the limbs turns the sinking into a surrender. The awake head on the right is set apart like a witness who sees what is happening but does not get involved, while the bodiless mask on the left edge carries a face taken off and left behind so as to get through what is undergone without feeling it.
A green body lies horizontally and no boundary is drawn between it and the blue surface beneath it. Where the body ends and where the water begins cannot be told apart. The arms are opened, the legs hang down, the waist region spread. Whether it is sinking or floating is not clear. In a sinking body there is usually a trace of resistance; here there is none. The limbs have loosened, resistance abandoned. The upper part of the body is light, the lower part darkens; the further down it goes the more it disappears. A section of the body has already become invisible. The end of the left arm blurs and merges with the surface, we cannot see where the hand is.
On the right there is a head, and that head is awake. Its eyes open, its mouth ajar, looking straight out. It stands far from the lying body, a little higher up. Like a witness who sees that something is happening but does not intervene. There are moments in sleep when a person notices they are watching their own dream; the looking side and the living side split in two. In this painting that split has been placed at two separate points. Right below the head stand two large green spheres, seated on a dark shadow. Their surfaces are smooth; the unruliness of the rest of the body is not there. The neck of the looking head is thin, barely connected to the body.
On the left edge a blue and pink mask hangs. Its eyes, eyebrows and mouth are drawn, but it has no body. It stands flat on the surface, with no depth. Like a face left behind. Not someone remaining on the shore but a face left on the shore; no bond has been made between it and the body in the water. To take off one's own face and set it aside is one of the ways of getting through what happens without feeling it. The mouth line of the mask is turned down; its expression fixed, an expression that will not change.
In the middle a black column descends, made with roughly hatched lines. It divides the body in two. It could be a crack, or an anchor. While everything around it is soft, it stands hard. Above and below there are pink feathered bursts; they resemble a bird's wing, and also an opened plant. At the edges of the scene things open, in its middle something comes undone. The tips of the feathers are drawn sharp, not agreeing at all with the softness in the middle.
Because of the horizontal form the difference between the upper and lower parts is erased. I cannot say which direction is the surface of the water. In dreams where the sense of direction is lost, falling and swimming turn into the same thing. In the upper right corner stands a dark, feathered mass, and that is the scene's only dark point. From there thin traces descend downward, like a place where something is leaking. It could be a substance dispersing in the water, it is not certain.
Society, Power and Technology
The bodies spread out in the water and the surface whose bottom cannot be seen tell how economic collapse, because it is slow, is not counted a disaster; the man sees that he is sinking but seeing is of no use, over three years giving up first the holiday, then the meat. Being unable to reach a floor makes the flailing uncertain, and as the floor the welfare state put beneath is withdrawn, everyone is left to his strokes.
The bodies are spread out horizontally, none of them standing upright. The surface beneath them is like water, thickening downward. In the middle there is a dark column coming down from above, fringed and disordered, mixing into the water. On the left a face, on the right another face; both have been left at the edge and are looking at the dispersal in the middle. In the title it is said that the drowning is conscious. That is, the one who is sinking knows what is happening. The matter is not ignorance.
The people who know this best are those who do the end-of-month sums. How much is the rent, how much the bill, how much the shopping. The numbers are set out, the table clear, the result clear too. The man is sinking and he sees it. Seeing is of no use whatever. Because economic collapse is slow it is not counted a disaster; it does not happen in a day, it happens over three years and each month you go down a little further. On the same wage you first give up the holiday, then you stop buying meat, then you put off the dentist. None of it becomes news. No one bangs on your door, no one drags you anywhere. It is only that each month you have a little less, and one day you cannot remember when you grew poor. That impoverishment is silent makes it hard, too, to speak about.
The distance between the surface of the water and the bottom matters. In this picture the bottom cannot be seen. The most exhausting side of sinking is this too, being unable to reach a floor. Once a person touches the bottom he can kick off and rise, but if it is not known where the bottom is, the length of the flailing becomes uncertain. The whole idea of the thing we call the welfare state was to put a floor beneath people. As that floor weakened, everyone was left to his own strokes. The retirement age lengthens, the hospital queue lengthens, the tenant's rights narrow. None of these is announced on the same day, and so drawing the link between them becomes hard. The sum of small, small withdrawals amounts to the withdrawal of the ground beneath a whole generation.
The two faces at the edge watch what is going on but do not go into the water. Those in the position of onlookers always exist. Usually, because their own feet are dry, they give advice to the one in the water; if only you had worked harder, if only you had managed your budget properly, if only you had not taken out that loan. There is a grain of truth in all these sentences and none of them is enough. The choices a person can make on his own and the conditions set by the exchange rate and the rent are not on the same scale. To put personal error and structural pressure in the same pan of the scales loads shame, too, onto the one who is sinking. The person who feels shame does not ask for help, and the one who does not ask for help sinks faster.
In the upper part there are things flying, winged, scattered. They have stayed above the water. The tip of the column in the middle, meanwhile, has come down all the way to the bottom and mixed into the blue of the surface, where it ends cannot be made out.
Art History and Comparison
Because Géricault made limb studies in the morgue for his raft, you can follow a single arm in that pile; in the pile here there is no arm to follow, the bodies having flowed into a shared mass. In Cézanne the merging of body and landscape is calculated; the merging here is uncalculated, body and background coming out of the same paint and losing their edge.
In the middle of the horizontal surface greenish bodies are piled one on another; where an arm ends, where a leg comes out, is hard to make out. On the left there is a mask face left outside the mass; a blue face set within a pink border. On the upper edge there are bunches of pink wings, which could be a bird or a flower. On the right a figure seated on a black chair, two large rounds before it. At the very bottom of the canvas a dense blue sets up a horizontal base.
To build a scene from piled-up bodies was the classical test of nineteenth-century grand painting. For Géricault's raft the painter made studies of limbs one by one in the morgues; in that pile each body has been examined separately and then placed one over another, which is why you can follow a single arm through the crowd. In this canvas there is no arm to follow. The bodies have flowed into one another, turned into a shared mass. There is a pile, but no counting. The pink bunches above sustain this uncertainty too; they stand like a beating of wings, but there is no connection to show which body they belong to.
The naked figures in or beside water are another vein. In Cézanne's bathers the body approaches the colour of the landscape, skin and tree are built with the same strokes, and the figure merges into nature. That merging is calculated, every patch knows its place. The merging here is uncalculated; the green bodies and the green in the background have come out of the same paint, and in places the edge of the figure has vanished. The word drowning in the title corresponds to this dissolving too, but the painting does not set up a scene of catastrophe. No one is thrashing, no one is asking for help. One of the questions twentieth-century figurative painting grappled with was this too: is it possible to carry the feeling of an event without showing it. Here the place of the event is taken only by the slackness of the bodies.
The figure with the chair on the right stands outside all this fluidity. The chair's legs are clear, its edges ringed with a dark line, and the figure is seated on it. In other works of the series the chair always appeared empty or hanging in the air; here at last someone has sat down. The scribbled dark figure on the right edge, meanwhile, seems made by an entirely different hand, with fine and tremulous lines; as though a spectator added to the edge after the painting was finished.
Among the series' 2019 canvases this is one of the few works made in horizontal format, and one of the examples in which the figures gather around an event. While in the vertical canvases of the same year a single figure is set up in the centre and its surroundings emptied, here there is no centre, the weight gathered to the left, and on the right edge a separate scene has begun. The mask face at the upper left continues to float alone, without connecting to the mass below.
Material, Gesture and the Viewer's Experience
The column of black hatching at the centre is foreign to the whole surface; while the green masses around it are wet and soft, there it is dry, thorny, broken, the bristles moving on catching and catching on the weave of the canvas. The difference between the dryness and the wetness of the green does not show on a screen; the screen gives both flat and erases the side of the surface that could be felt by hand.
The column of black hatching descending from the centre stands foreign to the whole surface. While everything around it is soft and borderless, there it is dry, thorny and broken. Hundreds of short lines one over another, all nearly vertical, with the white and blue beneath breathing between them. He made this with a stiff-bristled brush, reducing the paint right down; the bristles moved on catching and catching on the weave of the canvas, and each catch left a break. This column is not repeated anywhere else in the picture.
The green masses, on the contrary, are built wetly. Within them light green and white have run into each other and no border is left between; the brush there went back and forth before the paint had set and softened the transitions. Even at the edges there is no sharpness, the green scattering by thinning towards the white ground. In some places a darker green beneath strikes up, that is there are at least two coats and both were placed in the same session, I think, because I can see no dry border between them.
The white area on the left is laid on very thin. The cloth of the canvas reads there from end to end; the paint took only the crests of the loops, did not go into the gaps, and the surface stayed rough. The blue patches passing over this region are of the same fineness too, they do not cover the white beneath. The blue below, on the other hand, is saturated and thick; placed with vertical drags, it went to the lower edge and there the brush caught on the fold of the canvas and stopped. This difference of density between the two blues comes from two different thinnings of the same paint.
The pink flowers are flung one by one with flicks. Each petal formed by the pulling of a fine-tipped brush towards the centre; all open outward from a point and the paint runs out at their tips. In the cluster at the lower left corner I count about twenty. The dark area on the right, on the other hand, is built by dragging; a dry brush roamed over the pink beneath without covering it and left a smoky zone between the two. The same dry brush is used in the vertical mass on the right edge too, where the marks are longer and sag downward.
A surface whose ninety-centimetre edge stands parallel to the ground. In the upper left corner there is an area the paint never reached; the raw weave of the cloth is exposed there and where the picture began is visible. Looked at from two metres the green masses float on the surface. At a metre the floating stops, because the weave of the white beneath them pulls them back. At half a metre the green too falls apart and the only thing left in hand is the difference between the dryness of the black column and the wetness of the green. This difference does not show on a screen at all; the screen gives both at the same flatness and completely erases the side of the surface that could be felt by hand.
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