19 September 2026 — 1 November 2026

Ekrem Yalçındağ: The Language of Diversity, or Feeling at Home

Ekrem Yalçındağ's exhibition "The Language of Diversity, or Feeling at Home" is on view at CerModern from 19 September to 1 November. How many different things can exist at once within a single painting? Colour, pattern, motif, paint, surface, repetition, rhythm and the hand: each element has a character of its own, and together they do more than form an image. Over time they build a shared language. To look at Ekrem Yalçındağ's paintings is to watch how this language has matured and gradually grown into a world of its own. In Yalçındağ's work, diversity is not a sum of differences placed inside a whole that already exists. Each element carries its own movement: motifs multiply, colour vibrates, pattern advances across the surface and repetition turns into rhythm. Elements that differ from one another produce new relationships through their encounters, and the whole of the painting takes shape in the continuity of those relationships. The pictorial language formed over the years therefore becomes visible less in individual forms than in the ties between them. Each new painting adds to the visual memory the artist has already built and, at the same time, transforms it. A familiar motif returns in another colour, a customary order in a different rhythm, a known surface in a new movement. Carrying its own past, Yalçındağ's painting keeps moving forward. Here, diversity does not only describe the visible richness of the painting; it also shapes the way the painting thinks. Differences living side by side create a new unity within a shared rhythm. Geometric order and the intervention of the hand, repetition and variation, certainty and intuition meet on the same surface, and the painting stays alive through the tension of these encounters. In the course of this development, painting becomes for the artist a conceptual space in which he can feel at home. People feel at home in a world where they have come to recognise their own traces over time, and Yalçındağ's pictorial world creates just such a field of familiarity. Colours, motifs, rhythms and surfaces, linked together over the years, form the artist's distinctive visual memory. Every new painting is born from within this memory and widens it a little further. Home, in this sense, is less a place than a feeling of closeness: moving about inside an order you have built yourself, returning to it, changing it and recognising it anew. In Yalçındağ's practice this continuity is the foundation of belonging. The painting is rebuilt each time, and within that rebuilding the artist recognises his own voice. This is why the "or" in the title matters: The Language of Diversity, or Feeling at Home. There is no need to choose between the two expressions. Rather, one opens out within the other. The language of diversity turns into a home over time, and the sense of home arises from differences being able to coexist within the same rhythm. In Yalçındağ's paintings, what is different comes together, touches, repeats and transforms. Colour becomes sound, pattern becomes rhythm, motif becomes memory and surface becomes time. All of these movements build a pictorial world in which the artist can wander freely, year after year. Perhaps "home" is exactly such a place.

CerModern