Progeria: Gökçen Cabadan

Galerist performs its first presentation of 2008, which is also Gökçen Cabadan’s first solo exhibition, titled ‘Progeria’. Just like the other artists who have joined its family, Galerist presents a young artist again, by hosting his first solo exhibition. The exhibition that continues the tradition in this manner can be seen at Galerist on January 24 – February 23.

According to Cabadan, after the modern approach that portraits experience as the most important reality, in our understanding of aesthetics, work of art has opened to a new way of communication in which only the artist stays at the center. Furthermore, it took a form that composes the portrait of the artist in every way. Even in these days that we can not easily recognize our own personalities (or the meaning of “I”), the artist is persistent on continuing to follow this aesthetic tradition that occurred after romanticism. Cabadan believes that as long as the society exists together with its hierarchies, hunger of power and contemporary freedoms, the artist can do nothing but become a romantic.

Cabadan urges us to observe his point of view about the world by using the images of young and adolescent, just like psychoanalysis struggles to analyze entire ego by using the childhood era. In this way, the observer asks herself/himself if there are any other periods in the life of the human being.  The images that can be seen in the paintings of Cabadan have already been separated from each other in a way of jigsaw puzzle logic, even before him. The artist, in a genderless costume, aims to combine these pieces. In this case, symbols of the child and adolescent lose their purity and become isolated just like they were figures of adulthood. In the same fashion an unripe fruit is pecked by a bird and starts to rot before maturing… According to the artist this process has similarities with ‘Progeria’, the congenital disorder in children that triggers premature aging.