Perfect Moment: Leyla Gediz

Following a gap of two years, Leyla Gediz presents her new personal exhibition composed entirely of new works to the attention of the Istanbul audience. Last year, the artist opened personal exhibitions in Los Angeles and Zurich and made presentations at the Arco (Madrid) and ArtBrussels (Brussels) art fairs.

Gediz’s each phase sees her assemble her work under a theme, and for this exhibition she arranges a tête-à-tête for us with the thought of the “Perfect Moment.”

What is the “Perfect Moment”? It is a question we instinctively know the answer to. However, we have difficulty finding the words to express that feeling we know so well, because the “Perfect Moment” contains at once both possibility and impossibility. Gediz strives to draw and paint precisely this dilemma.

The artist understands depiction as a tool to grasp the “essence” of things, and whether she is painting a portrait of a character she is in awe of, or trying to unravel the mystery of a simple movement or a look, or if she is attempting to describe the ambiguous feel of chairs driven into a corner, the anxiety of the “Perfect Moment” continues to haunt her.

As Gediz, an expert in installation, intersperses her research, her clues, her positive/negative findings between the walls of Galerist, we oscillate between satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

Leyla Gediz succeeds in finding a way to make her helpless search ours.