Deconstruction of the visible world in the painting of Lola DiDangue
Written by David Knoll
3/9/2023
What the World is Transforming Into by Zeinep Assylbekova at Elm Hill Contemporary Art Gallery
Photo: Courtesy Elm Hill Contemporary Art Gallery, Norwich
What the World is Transforming Into, Zeinep Assylbekova’s Elm Hill Contemporary Art (Norwich) exhibition is complex and elementary, familiar and frightening with the unknown. The gallery space, a white room in which a multitude of colours nestle in monochromatic fields, becomes the site of a purely perceptual exchange between the viewer and the painted surface. These exchanges question the relationship between the artist’s intentions and the viewer’s response, positioning the artwork as a catalyst for this dialogue. The exhibition, comprising 15 new acrylic paintings on wood panels, continues Assylbekova’s formalist approach to painting, developing a practice that ultimately functions as a semiotics of abstraction.
Zeinep Assylbekova: Too Much, 2019, acrylic on wood panel, 33” x 35” (84 cm x 90 cm)
Photo: Courtesy Elm Hill Contemporary Art Gallery, Norwich
Zeinep Assylbekova constructs each painting as a specific set of colours, painted with meditative strokes as floating stripes and blocks that never touch but remain cohesive. Sometimes, the colours stand out, contrast or vibrate from each other, and sometimes, they recede or co-exist neutrally with the pictorial space. The paintings form relationships with each other on the wall in the same way that colours form relationships on the surface of a painted wood panel. The artworks contain seemingly direct references to modernist trends, from Piet Mondrian or the American abstract classics to colour field and grid paintings. However, unlike them, Zeinep Assylbekova’s paintings are based on the indigestible environment of mass communication in which we live.
Zeinep Assylbekova: Confrontation I, 2021, acrylic on wood panel, 55” x 31” (140 cm x 78.7 cm)
Photo: Courtesy Elm Hill Contemporary Art Gallery, Norwich
For several years, Assylbekova was engaged in deconstruction: she extracted colours from the visible world and formulated them into a vocabulary of abstract forms. Thus, the artist created a model of perception that involves transforming one type of stimulus into another while she acts as a conductor in what Umberto Eco called communication chains. In Too Much (2019), blocks of two shades of green and grey floating together on the left side of the painting are contrasted by blue and three shades of deep pink, none of which seem to line up. The viewer perceives them as they are: two groups opposed to each other. Zeinep Assylbekova creates a perceptual discourse that can only occur as a meeting with reality in the present.
Zeinep Assylbekova: Confrontation II, 2021, acrylic on wood panel, 55” x 31” (140 cm x 78.7 cm)
Photo: Courtesy Elm Hill Contemporary Art Gallery, Norwich
In one of the previous series, Assylbekova used company logos, political party emblems and various associations found in the world as material. For this exhibition, however, she shifted her source material to several paintings by the great masters she had encountered at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Through her process, Zeinep Assylbekova has transformed the palettes of Rembrandt and Raphael's paintings into chromatic sets that embody the essence of these masters’ artworks. This transformation from one phenomenological field to another – from the field of these masters to Assylbekova’s area – further abstracts the communication process. Artist creates what she calls ‘subjective partitions’, ultimately serving as a screen between the artists and the viewer.
Zeinep Assylbekova: Population, 2022, acrylic on wood panel, 30” x 30” (76.2 cm x 76.2 cm)
Photo: Courtesy Elm Hill Contemporary Art Gallery, Norwich
Each painting represents a plane of shapes and colours that does not go beyond formal relationships. The interaction of these compositional elements resonates in the visible field. Thus, they are independent but connected, together but separate. The increasing complexity of Assylbekova’s source material raises questions regarding the nature of each painting and its titles. Confrontation I, Confrontation II, Precarious Community and Loneliness (all 2021) indicate the existence of factions within each painting. However, the names often have a less straightforward double meaning: Minority, Sample and Population (all 2022) are typical examples. In Selection, four colours are grouped in a white field. The picture can be visually divided into two colour groups, which contradict the shapes of the figures. However, a name that refers to a small group of people or things by which an experiment or product is measured indicates a communication medium. Zeinep Assylbekova chooses titles for her series and paintings to show how corporations and institutions categorise, interpret, and frame experiments and strategies, often to persuade, incite, influence, or placate audiences. Reading the artwork and its title gives it a chilling substructure that recalls Assylbekova’s previous methods of appropriating corporations and political aesthetics.
Zeinep Assylbekova: Loneliness, 2021, acrylic on wood panel, 30” x 30” (76.2 cm x 76.2 cm)
Photo: Courtesy Elm Hill Contemporary Art Gallery, Norwich
With her new approach, Assylbekova slowly moves toward a ‘continuum of transformation’, where each painting becomes antipodal, like planes inserted perpendicular to the unidirectional flow of time. Thus, the paintings become signals of colour, brief and intense, flashing indicators in an intense field of communication noise that masks the sinister codes of institutional and corporate power. Based on this, Zeinep Assylbekova perhaps proposes a new method of approach: to remake the codes that dominate the semiotic and photographic universe in our own image. We must continue to invent radical tactics by which we can return to the present, the physical, and the essence of being.
David Knoll has published widely on international modernism and in 2011 was a Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow. From 2017-21, in addition to his role in the department, he served as Curator in Charge of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art and now sits on the Advisory Committee. David holds a Ph.D. from the University of Aberdeen.