Ahmet Merey “Free Climb”

Ahmet Merey

Free Climb

Mountain-themed abstract paintings by Ahmet Merey with “Free Climbing” are on display at Art Suites Gallery. The artist, who knew the mountains very well, organized several climbs to some mountains and transferred the traces that remained in his mind after these climbs. The mountains he has climbed since his childhood have become shelters where he can breathe by escaping from the city, approach the sky, become aware of himself, stay alone, and listen to his own voice. His free brush rides, comfortable spatula tracks describe other geographies where he can breathe freely instead of the suffocating atmosphere of big cities. These details are the traces of a geography that he perceives as a distant dream outside of urban life and perhaps deeply longed. Looking down from the summit of the mountain climbed, the excitement of being thousands of meters high and far from the frame of daily life prevails in the consciousness of the mountaineer. The pictorial adventure of the painter-mountaineer comes into play in leaving this wave behind and preserving the impressive atmosphere and the roughness of the summit in memory. The shocking effect of admiration for nature is the first element that attracts attention carefully in the impressions that Merey obtained from the summits that are the subject of his paintings. Although the distribution of colors melting into each other and responding to the structural texture of the mountain topography seems to coincide with a painting produced with an abstract-smudge technique, it is also seen that this distribution highlights a lived reality.