wings of abyss, 2019: a reading in seven lenses
Acrylic on canvas, 65 × 90 cm (25 ⅝ × 35 ⅜ in). Painting by Yiğit Özen.
At a Glance
Three long beaks rise from the same blue body on separate necks, each looking a different way, their crests flung back at the top. The head that grows anew each time it is cut is, in the narratives, the sign of the endless calamity; but these heads are birds, close to the stork or the heron, that is heralds of good news and of the seasons of passage. Once the three are bound to a single body, the border between herald and monster blurs. In the heraldic tradition the double-headed eagle is a sign of power watching two directions at once, the two heads always equal and opposed; here the heads are three and none matches another. Once the coat of arms is undone, what remains is not a dynastic sign but a self-sufficient animal. That all three mouths are closed suggests the news has not yet been given.
Four large spirals are set on the body, each drawn in a single stroke by pressing the brush into the centre and turning it from the forearm, their diameters reaching twenty centimetres. They read as eggs, as eyes, as nipples too. They summon the peacock with eyes set on its wings, and the celestial watchers, but all of them turn in a closed spiral, like a guard who has abandoned his watch. The word abyss in the title ties to this void too; the abyss is not below but opened upon the body, like a person fearing the very place they carry. A salmon-pink base widens from lower right, and along the thin band where it touches the navy body it purples and turns to lilac. The white lines are drawn while the blue was still moist, grey veins entering into them; no source is sought for the light, the strokes only follow the contour.
The upper left corner is a dark brown darkness, where a pink infant hangs upside down, a cross in its eyes, another cross on its belly. To turn a toy over and hang it resembles punishing it; in Renaissance Italy traitors were painted hung upside down on the wall, here a rag doll is put in the convict's place. Its body is built by the same bubble method as the main figures of the series; once the size shrinks, the same method produces a toy. None of the birds turns toward it, no string or hand visible between them, the distance a few steps and no one taking that step. Below, thin legs barely carry this mass, and stick structures drawn without a ruler are spread on the ground, like a tent pole or a trestle, recalling a temporary shelter. From two metres the blue mass is a whole; at thirty centimetres the interpenetration of white and blue within a line turns into a paint event in its own right.
Form and Composition
Three long tips opening out like a fan are arrayed towards the upper right at the same angle and set up the only regular rhythm and the diagonal going from the lower left to the upper right. Because the forms are drawn with a light line over the dark fill, the contour comes not from darkness but from light, while the dark void in the left half tilts the mass to the right.
Three long tips are arrayed towards the upper right, all looking up at the same angle. The lowest at mid-height, the highest in the upper right corner, and the crop cuts it. The distances between them are close to equal; this threefold series is the painting's only regular rhythm and opens from the body like a fan. Behind each of them there is a short fringed cluster, and the same texture repeats in all three. Because their directions are fixed, they add a strong diagonal force to the composition; the line going from the lower left to the upper right is set up by them.
The body gathers in the lower central region. Inside it there are four large spirals, each turning to its own centre, their centres placed irregularly. The largest in the lower centre, the smallest near the right edge. The spirals do not touch, and dark interstitial areas remain between them. This inner order takes the body out of being a flat mass and turns it into a compartmented surface. The left edge of the body descends with a long leg; the leg is almost dead straight and goes to the bottom edge, its thickness about an eighth of the body.
In the lower band the ground turns to light value. Its boundary is a slanted line high on the left edge and descending to the right. Above this line there is a dark area, below it a light area, and there is no intermediate tier between the two. In the light band there stand four-legged skeletons drawn with thin lines; all at the same height, all of the thickness of a bar, arrayed side by side. Their scale is a tenth of the body. The feet of the main mass, too, enter this band, the toes spreading and cut off a finger's width short of the bottom edge.
In the upper left corner there is a separate small figure. It stands upside down, its body built from overlapping roundnesses, with fringed hands and feet at the tips. It hangs from the top edge and the crop cuts it from above. Its height is a third of the main mass. The area around it is empty, only dark ground. This corner is the composition's second centre of weight; a diagonal balance is set up between it and the large mass on the right.
The contour is light in colour and thick. The forms are drawn with a light line over the dark fill, that is, the line comes not from darkness but from light. The distinction weakens in the right central region; there the edge of the body drops to the same value as the dark area behind and the boundary disappears. The void gathers in the left half. Between the left edge and the body there is a wide dark area, its height almost the whole canvas, its width a fifth of the crop. On the right side there is no such interval; the mass touches the right edge at several points. This imbalance tilts the painting to the right, and the small figure in the upper left stands as a counterweight. The light value of the lower band, meanwhile, sets up a base from below upward and marks the plane the mass sits on.
Colour and Light
The salmon floor is the only broad warm area on the surface; at the boundary where it touches the blue of the body the pink goes purple and the blue turns to lilac. Because the upper part of the figure is at the same value as the dark brown it merges into it and disappears, while its lower part stays sharp on the salmon; the white strokes follow not the light but the contour.
A salmon pink floor widens upwards from the lower right. Its colour is between coral and flesh, white and a touch of orange mixed into it; laid flat, the brush marks few. This pink is the only broad warm area on the surface and it is in direct contact with the blue of the figure. At the boundary where they touch the pink goes purple, and the edge of the blue too is smeared with pink and turns to lilac; along a thin band the two colours have passed into one another. The body wanders between navy and cobalt. Its darkest places are under the wing and the line of the neck, where the blue reaches almost to black. In the rings at the centre a light sky blue comes out; the same paint lightened with white. The white lines were drawn over the blue while wet, and so in most places they have not stayed pure, dropping to steel grey. At the tip of one wing and over the beak the white is set thick and there it is genuinely bright.
The upper left corner is dark brown. An area verging on maroon, dirty, holding darker patches within it; the end of the darkness scale is there. The upper part of the figure enters into this brown and its boundary grows indistinct; because the dark blue of the wing and the brown of the ground are at the same value the eye does not separate them. The lower part of the same figure, on the pink, is on the other hand terribly sharp. The small figure at the upper left is painted in light pink. It is a register lighter and cooler than the salmon of the ground; the insides of the rings on its body escape slightly towards grey. Because it stands on top of the dark brown the highest contrast on the whole surface forms there. The crosses in its eyes and the dots on its belly are a dark pink verging on red, and nowhere else is there that colour.
The wing forms in the upper region consist almost entirely of white and brown. The blue has not climbed up there, it has only seeped in as a few thin strips. Because of this the upper third of the painting stays two-coloured, while its lower part is three-coloured. The long white sweep at the upper right is the longest single movement of the brush, its edges frayed and not fully covering the brown beneath it; the paint there thinned and left a beige shadow. No source is sought for the light. The white strokes do not imitate light, they follow the contour; some of them pass over the form and spill outside. Where the figure stands the ground does not change at all; there is no cast shadow patch, the pink continues in the same tone at the foot of the feet.
In the lower band there are small forms scribbled with thin purple blue lines. The paint there is very thin, it does not cover the pink; the colour mixes with the pink and turns into a pale mauve. The weakest colour layer on the surface is there. In the lower right corner a small signature has been thrown in a dark ink colour over the pink, one end of the letters rubbing against the pink and thinning.
Iconography, Myth and Title
When three beaks are bound to a single body, the border between a stork-like herald bird and the many-headed monster that represents endless trouble blurs, and the three closed mouths say that the news has not been given. Although the rings on the wing recall the guardian eyes that come from the peacock, all are closed, and the abyss in the title turns flight into the risk of falling.
Three long beaks reach upward, in different directions. All three come out of the same blue body; the necks thin and long, dishevelled feathers raised behind the heads. The body is wide and on it there are large rings, each carrying a kernel at its centre. Below, thin legs come down to the ground and claws press on the pink surface. At the upper left there is a pink figure hung upside down; in place of its eyes there are cross-marks. The pink of the ground collides with the blue of the bird.
The motif of the many-headed creature is found in almost every narrative tradition. The head that grows anew each time it is cut off is the sign of endless trouble. The heads here are all birds; close to the description of a stork or a heron. Those birds are usually heralds of good news, of birth and of the transitional seasons. When three of them are bound to a single body, the border between herald and monster blurs. Which head speaks is not clear, and all three look in different directions at the same time. This scattering shows not a flock but the dividedness of a single being. All three mouths being closed suggests that the news has not yet been given.
The rings on the body are a repeating sign. At the centre of each there is a light-coloured core; it can be read as an egg or as an eye. Eyes on the wing carry a long tradition that begins with the peacock and extends to the heavenly guardians. The all-seeing being is shown with eyes fitted to its wings. Here none of these eyes is open, all turn in a closed spiral. A wing bearing a closed eye is the sign of a guardian who has abandoned his watch. Read as eggs, the body turns into a nest.
The hanging figure at the upper left is the second pole of the scene. The body hung upside down is the common image of punishment narratives and of fortune-telling cards; the state in which the person sees the world upside down or awaits their punishment. This figure's eyes too are cancelled and there is one more cross on its belly. Beside the bird it remains toy-sized. The distance between the winged one and the hanging one sets up the distinction between the one who can fly and the one who cannot. Who tied the string is not visible; the string is cut off above.
The word abyss in the title points to the void beneath the wing. The word wing on its own calls up ascent; combined with the abyss, the direction changes. A reading emerges to the effect that a wing is needed to fall as well. This idea takes flight out of being an ability and turns it into a risk. On the ground, at the foot, there are small structures drawn with thin blue lines; they stand like table legs or fence pieces and remain at toy scale beside the bird's size. In the lower right corner those lines resemble a ladder, but its rungs are too sparse to count.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
The face of the pink baby hanging upside down is erased with crosses, and a punishment resembling turning a toy one is angry with upside down and forgetting it stands in the darkest corner of the scene. Each head of the many-necked being reaches in a separate direction and they cannot agree, while the spirals covering the body turn into holes opening into the interior and carry the abyss onto the body.
In the upper left a pink baby hangs upside down. Its arms and legs are opened, its fingers spread, its body made of round protrusions. Where its face should be there are crosses. To turn a toy upside down and hang it resembles punishing it. A child treats a toy it is angry with like this; it does not break it, but leaves it head down and forgets it there. The darkest part of the painting is exactly that corner. Small rounds are lined up on its body; the chest, the navel, the joints have all been marked with the same form. The only rule that builds the body is that repetition. Its fingers, even so, are drawn one by one, with care.
In the middle of the scene stands a many-necked blue being. Three, perhaps four necks have risen from the same body, with long, sharp beaks at their ends. Each looks in a separate direction. None sees the other, there is no agreement among them. They stand like several desires that a single body has been forced to carry; all fed from the same place but reaching out to different places. The feathers at their crowns are scattered, flung back. The thickness of the necks is not equal either; one is drawn coarser, darker than the others. There seems to be a precedence among them, but which is dominant is not clear.
The surface of the body is full of spirals. Five or six whirlpools, each turning towards its own centre. These resemble a nipple, and also an eye, and also a hole. They work like openings descending into the interior of the body. The word abyss appears in the painting's title, and that abyss has opened not below but on the body itself. This is surely what it is to be afraid of one's own insides; the void is not outside but exactly in the place one carries. The centres of the spirals have been left white; in the middle of each there is a small brightness.
Below, the legs are thin and weak. Divided into toes like a bird's feet, they press on the ground but do not look able to carry this mass. Around the feet there are thin lines that look as if drawn with a pencil, small tables or stands. A drawing taken from a child's notebook, placed beneath the real body. It is as though the figure had entrusted its own weight to a flimsy structure it drew itself. The tips of the toes are scattered forward and back, they do not press firmly on the ground.
The area behind is split in two. In the upper part a dark brown darkness, below a pink ground. The baby is in the darkness, while the bird body stands upon the pink area. No connection is drawn between the two, neither a string nor a hand. Even so they are present in the same painting, and none of the beaks has turned that way. The distance between them is short, a place of a few steps. No one takes that step.
Society, Power and Technology
The beaked heads piled row upon row and the stretching necks carry the asymmetrical waiting of the single window standing against a heap at the border gate. The eyes placed over the body show that displaced people are the group about whom the most data is collected but who cannot themselves use that data.
Long-beaked heads are piled one on another, at least four can be counted, all stretched in different directions. Their bodies do not separate from one another, they have become a single mass. Beneath them there are thin legs, the feet touch the ground and on the ground there are skeletons drawn in sticks; like tent poles, like a coffee table. This is the state of crowds waiting together. No one wants to lean on anyone else but the space is so tight that the bodies fuse. After a while no one has a boundary of his own left; an elbow falls against another's rib, a shoulder against another's chin, and this becomes normal.
The necks are all stretched up and forward. Waiting people's necks grow long; when will the door open, when will our turn come, are we on the name list. At the border gate, in front of the consulate, in the registration office there is the same stance. A heap of people, a single window. The person who opens the window forgets by evening how many people he looked at that day, while the man in front of the window remembers that day to the end of his life. The asymmetry between them is written nowhere. On one side there is a routine procedure, on the other the direction of a whole life. The time of people standing on the two sides of the same desk does not flow at the same speed.
Large rings are drawn over the body, their middles open. They stand like eyes. Eyes placed over the crowd. People who are displaced are the most recorded group in the world; fingerprints are taken, the face is scanned, a number is given, a file is opened. The people counted as most uncertain in identity are in fact the people about whom the most data is collected. The difference is that they cannot use that data, it is used about them. There is an archive that knows where he stayed, whom he spoke to, which cell his phone connected to; but to the one who wants to see his own file that same archive is closed. When transparency works in one direction only, its name becomes surveillance.
Up at the top left a small being sways upside down, two crosses marked on its face, its arms hanging down. It is not part of the rest of the scene, it has been left at the edge. This is just how we count those left behind on a journey, apart from the main group, in the corner, alone. In the news they appear as a number. Beside the number what the weather was like that day is also written, and the subject is closed.
The striped structures at the bottom remind me of the temporary. Things that can be taken apart and put up again. We have seen how long structures set up somewhere as temporary have stayed; ten years, fifteen years, sometimes a generation. The word temporary serves the interest of the helping side, it does not serve the interest of the one who lives there. The birds' feet have gone in among those sticks, which leg belongs to whom cannot be made out.
Art History and Comparison
The two heads of the double-headed eagle are equal and facing each other as the coat of arms requires; the three heads here do not match, and once the coat of arms breaks down what remains is not a dynastic sign but a self-sufficient animal. In the Renaissance traitors were exposed by being hung upside down; the upside-down figure here is not a convict but a rag doll, the form of the punishment taken up and a toy put in its place.
Three long-beaked heads rise from the same body on separate necks; each looks in a different direction, dishevelled feathers on their tops. The body sits on thin legs, the feet spread on the ground with three or four toes. Large spirals have been placed on the belly, each of which can also be read as an eye. At the upper left there is a pink doll hung upside down, crosses in its eyes, its hands and feet splayed.
The many-headed bird is one of the most familiar figures of the heraldic tradition. On Seljuk stones and Byzantine textiles the double-headed eagle is a sign of power watching two directions at once; the two heads are always of equal size and face each other, because the coat of arms must be legible. In this canvas the number of heads is three, and none matches another; one has reached forward, one has drawn back, the third is bent down. Once the coat of arms breaks down, what remains is not a dynastic sign but a self-sufficient animal. The length of the beaks, too, runs counter to the shortness of the eagle's beak in heraldry; the mouths here are closer to fishing birds than to birds of prey, tuned to waiting rather than to threat.
The spirals placed on the body connect to a separate line. In early medieval manuscripts, especially in the decorations of the island monasteries, animal bodies are filled with coils and rings, and the skin turns into a field of pattern. Those patterns are part of an order, repeated across the page. The spirals here do not repeat, all four turn at a different size and in a different direction. At the very moment they come closest to being a pattern, they give themselves away by their irregularity.
As for the figure hung upside down, this has a heavy counterpart in the history of painting. In Renaissance Italy there was a form of public exposure in which traitors were depicted hung upside down on the wall; the painting functioned as a punishment, and who was depicted was known to all. The upside-down figure here is not a person being exposed but a toy. The form of the punishment scene has been taken up, and a rag doll placed in the convict's place. The birds do not look at it either. The doll's body is again built from bubbles, that is, made with the same method as the series' main figures; once its size is reduced, the same method produces a toy.
The pale lines at the lower edge are an interesting layer. Thin lines left under the paint, drawn by hand rather than with a ruler, standing like a table or a scaffold; clearly drawn at an earlier stage and covered over afterward. They may be the first attempt of a hand working without a sketch. Among the canvases dated 2019 this work is one of the first examples in which the animal figure moves ahead of the human figure; 2020's bird-headed bodies seem to come out of here, the difference being that there the bird and the human are joined in a single body.
Material, Gesture and the Viewer's Experience
Each of the four spirals is a single turn coming from the whole forearm; their diameters reach twenty centimetres, the paint thickest at the centre, almost none left on the brush in the last coil. The white lines are flung while the blue is damp, lifting the blue beneath and running the two paints within the line as grey veins without mixing.
Each of the four spirals on the body is a single turning movement. The brush was placed at the centre, pressed and drawn by being turned outward; the thickness thins to the end of the turn, and in none of them is there a second beginning. In the lowest spiral the brush made two turns and on the second turn rode over its own mark, and there the paint thickened twofold. In doing this the hand must have turned not from the wrist but from the whole forearm; their diameters reach twenty centimetres. At their centres the paint is thickest, thinning outward, and in the last coil almost no paint was left on the brush.
The white lines are flung over the blue while the blue was still damp. I make this out from the grey veins that enter into the white; as the brush carried the white it also lifted the blue beneath a little, and the two paints ran side by side within the line without mixing. Along the outer line of the leg this mixing is at its clearest; the line veers white in places, grey in places, and these transitions are not equally spaced but change according to the pressure of the hand. The beaks are left at the same wetness too; each beak is a single sharp pull and at its tip the brush lifted as if tearing away from the surface.
The dark area on the left is built with the dragging method. An almost dry brush roamed over the lighter brownish layer beneath and left that layer without fully covering it. From the gaps yellowish and earth-coloured pieces seep through. The weave of the canvas is the place that reads clearest in this region; the paint clung only to the backs of the loops, and in the hollows the tone beneath stands as it is. The pink ground beneath, on the contrary, is laid on flat and in a single coat, but so thin that the grain of the cloth comes up from beneath.
The blue lines on the lower edge are the work of an altogether different tool. Thin, dry and broken; they were drawn over the pink after it had thoroughly dried and nowhere did they lift the pink beneath. The birds' feet are of the same fineness too, with fingernails one by one. The pink figure at the upper left, on the other hand, carries the most covering paint; for it to be able to stand in a single coat over the dark ground plenty of white must have been added into it, because the brown beneath strikes up from nowhere.
Ninety tall, sixty-five wide; an upright rectangle. Looked at from two metres the blue mass is a whole. At a metre the mass separates into spirals and arcs. At thirty centimetres, meanwhile, you can see how the white and the blue enter into each other within the line, and those lines cease to be a border and turn into a paint event in their own right. The signature in the lower right corner is left on the pink ground with a fine tip, in a single touch. On the right edge there is a place where the blue overflows into the pink; there the two paints met and a thin border tinged with purple was left between them, not wiped away.
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