UNPEACEFUL LANDSCAPES

RAHMİ ÖĞDÜL

 

Landscape painting was invented during the process of domesticating nature. The enclosing fences the mankind built around himself separated himself from nature. While he created an absolute order, a cosmos, on the inside, he described the nature extending beyond the fences as the absolute chaos. The elements of nature, an area full of terrifying forces, can be admitted within the fences only if they have been tamed and taken under control. The landscape painting representing nature is therefore decorating our walls as a representation of domesticated nature. Even the representations of the mighty face of nature, which gave rise to the concept of sublimity of the Romantics, in time cannot help but become a part of our cliché-ridden nature repertoires.

 

When we start stuttering like Romantics becoming speechless in front of an unacquainted landscape, we express the ineffability and weirdness of the experience we undergo. In 18th century, the Romantics who took hikes on Alps and saw quaint, strange nature sceneries for the first time, were trying to transform their terror into familiar terms by screaming: “Salvador Rosa! Poussin! Saveri! Ruisdael!”. In a sense they were trying to place the new one in old frames, domesticate the wild one. As the Romantics came across the mightiness of nature, they resorted in representations of nature as a result of what they had gone through, and were counting the names of landscape painters who were associated with the concept of sublimity. Thereby, they were comforting themselves by domesticating the ineffable one and the obstreperousness of the experience through representations. Carrying meanings like ‘worth picturing’ and ‘picture’, the term picturesque emphasises a method that puts the disturbing elements of natural world through process and reproduces them.Ultimately a highly aesthetical and commodified nature scenery comes in sight, so while looking at it we assimilate it to a cliché and comfort ourselves.

 

Yet, there is an untamable side in the paintings of Enis Malik Duran, one that does not fall into the trap of the picturesque --arguably because of that he pictures the boundary districts: the zones of transition in between the tamed and the stranger. The settled organize themselves in the form of concentric circles; while approaching to the boundary, the effect of the zone controlled by the center gradually decreases. Boundary district: a zone where the territory of the absolute order, i.e. the cosmos tangles with the perilous forces of chaos. Landscapes of Enis Malik Duran make us feel as if we are present in an uncanny geography. Not a peaceful landscape. The arrangements in the boundary districts resemble open wounds on the earth, rather just like stab wounds. Letting the canvas absorb the gloomy colors with irritating brush strokes, brings these wounds onto surface. When you put your hand on, you touch a ragged and wild surface, not a smooth one. Moreover, barbed wires reminding thorny plants of arid lands, open unhealable wounds on our skins. Boundary district is also a zone where fatal wounds are inflicted on human body. If those who try to cross the border succeed in passing the minefield, they might as well get caught in the crossfire and their wounded or dead bodies leave traces on this land: scars on the earth and on the body. The trace fields in Duran’s paintings remind us of dead bodies, the dead bodies stuck in between captivity and freedom. We are in a strange area. Far from the center of the settled, we are in the uncertainty zone of the boundary district.

 

In Duran’s paintings, trace appears as a dominant theme; sometimes as a slit or a cleft in the heart of the nature and often as a boundary line separating two regions from each other. Boundary has always accompanied the concept of freedom. Let us remember the movie “Truman Show”: The protagonist was setting forth to the horizon with his boat in order to pull out from that stifling and repetitive atmosphere of the land, yet he came up against a wall that constantly runs away from us instead of the horizon line itself. The moment that his boat thrusts into the horizon line, or rather the wall painted as a panorama of horizon, is the moment when both disappointment and enlightenment are experienced. When power constructs a wall in the place of the horizon line which constantly flees from us, and paints a landscape picture on this wall so that we can amuse ourselves with watching images of nature, it was in fact being summed up the whole history of landscape painting. While we could have paid attention to nature’s call and set on a journey coming upon unexpected things instead of repetitions, we find ourselves trapped between the walls and watching the landscape paintings; we just cannot break away from the place which power has codified and defined.

 

The boundary is a line separating the inside from the outside. The boundary is also a territory where hope can flourish for those who are running away from the oppression of the inside, from its suffocating absolute order. It is a zone where the best and the worst things can unexpectedly happen to a person; on the contrary of the inside, which consists of repetitions. A challenging threshold to pass through on the journey to hope. Only after having left behind the mined and dangerous parts of the border can we reach beyond the boundary, beyond the existing reality where our imagination could thrive. We are now in the zone of ambiguity between the existing reality and our dreams. Enis Malik Duran makes us feel this discomforting ambiguity, this uncanny zone.

 

There is also something disturbing in the topography of the land where the artist spent his childhood. The fissures on the landscape seem like the curves where the woes of the past events, passed down from generation to generation, accumulated. Or, like the black holes on the ground, with hyenas awaiting around. As the mankind drifts away from nature, isolating himself within fences, he locked himself in the hierarchical tower of a vertical organization, and placed himself at the top, looking down on nature. Alternatively, when this hierarchical tower to be turned upside down, we would observe that it turns into a well on earth, and the mankind would find himself sitting at the very bottom. At the top of the tower, or down at the bottom of the well, it matters not. These are the scars of the deep wounds inflicted on both nature and human nature. The mankind is deceived by the illusion that he is rising as he distances himself from earth, whereas in fact he imprisons himself in the darkness of a bottomless abyss. The hyenas are watching this creature at the bottom, as the flow of life continues on the surface.

 

The paintings of Enis Malik Duran discomfort us, for they reveal the deep wounds inflicted by the power on both the Earth and the human body; there is no room to relax here, getting tricked by the clichés of the picturesque. The acts of “geography”, meaning “earth description/drawing”, continue their impact on bodies. The deep scars that the power leaves on earth while trying to re-draw it are accompanied by the wounds on bodies.