Like the founders of the pioneering Bauhaus school in Germany between the two world wars, he was a proponent of abolishing the distinctions between fine arts and applied arts. He then turned away from the rigour of architecture to open himself up to plastic research, drawing and painting, convinced, he admits, that he would find the freedom and happiness he was lacking there. The artist's first solo exhibition at the La La Lande gallery at the end of 2021 was entitled "Heterotopia & Anachronia", evoking heterotopias, a terminology borrowed from Foucault to designate these other places, these "localized utopias" in an elsewhere outside of society and its norms. Is it not the role of an artist to offer the viewer heterotopias, whether they be utopian or dystopian? For writer Michel Butor, our gaze is not only vision when we look at a painting because it summons a whole conscious and unconscious universe. A previous discourse and our own state of mind accompany the work we are looking at. Therefore, our sensitive experience when facing the work appears partly distorted by everything that comes before it. The same is true for the work of Eser Gündüz who uses multi-media practices (painting, drawing, artificial intelligence, NFT, 3D modelling, etc.) to offer his viewers several ways to approach his works. The multidisciplinary nature of his work allows him, he says, to offer many points of view and subjectivity to everyone.
Eser Gündüz's current exhibition at the La La Lande gallery is entitled 'The World against the World'. Although the title has a geopolitical connotation, the artist refuses to be political. Moreover, a Macintosh computer broadcasts the following announcement: "Attention. This exhibition is not a political exhibition. Thank you for your understanding.
Today's world is full of tensions and violent confrontations, from the war in Ukraine to the outbreak of nationalism around the world. Militia, the masterpiece of the exhibition, shows two soldiers shaking hands. Is it an armistice or a white peace? The two men belong to the army, but their uniforms, which refer to different eras, seem to signify that the past haunts the present much more than we think in an ever more frenetic succession of events. The handwritten maxim on the canvas Forward the Revolution seems to be a warning. Peoples live and die but wars are always the same, initiated for the same territorial, nationalistic, economic claims... The cyclical time of History, like that of humanity, is an eternal restart after its extinction. Modern states, however evolved, learn nothing from their mistakes and human losses. History seems condemned to repeat itself because 'man is a wolf to man' according to Hobbes' theory, for whom human beings could only rely on an all-powerful guardian to whom they can delegate their rights and who assigns them their duties. Today's states have replaced this Hobbesian Leviathan.
Eser Gündüz's research goes back and forth between past and present, form and writing, painting within the tradition of art history and works created by artificial intelligence. This places him in a timeless and universal total art approach. Each element of his compositions responds to a formal or structural necessity, what the artist calls "architectural morphology". The artist is a free spirit and visionary. The message he conveys is made by diverting objects and concepts. In this way, he offers the viewer the possibility of reconstructing the message and elaborating his own questioning.
Eser Gündüz - « The World against the World » — Galerie La La Lande - 11/12/22 - 15/01/23
Photos © Lionel Roche
