In her 18th solo exhibition titled MEMORIA, Özlem Kalkan Erenus is addressing human in terms of individual and social dimensions. Tracing the trails left in the mind of the artist; faces, crowds and then streets turn into moments and signs of memories.
Memory has the characteristic of imagery accumulation. French film theorist Christian Metz says, that “reality does not tell stories, but memory is entirely imaginative.” Within the created world of images, memory carries out a continuous movement back and forth, where it doesn’t need a linear editing of time. Through the experiences, the memory chooses and reserves fragments of reality and usually re-constitutes their meanings.
The peculiar figurative descriptions of Erenus, multiplied by fragmentation and juxtaposed in poliptych arrangements do not perform a narrative disposition. These figurative fragments can be associated with a holistic expression instead.
For the exhibition MEMORIA, Erenus composes about 50 pieces of canvas, which were created between 2004-2016. The artist considers these canvases as partial images seeping through her memory. During each new exhibition process, at each new site, where the works meet with the audience, she reinterprets them within the scope of a constructive intellectuality and aims to introduce a non-chronological concept of continuity.
By the use of cement, sand and other unconventional materials on canvas, Özlem Kalkan Erenus describes a new surface structure, while she inclines to diverse textural values. The effort of simulating a stone-like structure in material can be designated with the research of a plasticity transferred onto canvas.
