Mustafa Karasu “Monologue”

Mustafa Karasu

Monologue

“Here you go, I was there

Mustafa Karasu keeps the light alive in the moving magic of darkness in his canvases: The fluctuating dark tone presents the idea of ​​escape in the viewer in the puzzle of where to start on the canvas. A narrative that transcends the frame with unknowability carries the figure, which is prepared to go out of the space, beyond itself. The figures and images spread on the canvas surface live in their own being by autonomizing their movements in the common world they create in the canvas: The canvas-body begins to be visible at this point. The figure of the figure, throughout this artist’s self-portrait, invites the rival narrative that throws itself out of the frame, spatial expansion, the subject: the contact of the canvas-body to the costume of the portrait makes the viewer cast the magic of the incomprehensible. The viewer traverses the canvas without figuring out where to start the prediction. Without realizing the priority of the escape movement of the painting or the figure, it shows that the entities between form-human, canvas-body, things are shaped by the power of the human, artist-will. The transformation of the canvas surface into a living body looks like a living texture. What distinguishes the artist’s paintings from baroque expression is the mobility of the surface. The dark, deep use of paint keeps the figure at its living point inside and outside the canvas by spreading the skin over the whole surface, eliminating the difference between thing and human. In the work named “Blood River”, it is impossible to separate from the I, the world imprisoned the I. The meaning transmission of the image, the instrumental paint quality of the canvas-body, expose the image in the pool of blood that movement does not allow for escape: The expression that comes alive with the canvas is trapped between artist-will, image-power. ”
Zeliha Burtek
Istanbul, 2012