Jun 18

Cem Basarir

Cem Basarir is a contemporary painter who has exhibited extensively in Canada, especially Toronto and internationally in the United Kingdom, Turkey, and France. Since 2011 he has participated in almost 100 exhibitions to date. Recent solo exhibits include repeated features at Gallery Walrus and a showcase at Cambria Gallery, both in Toronto. Publications include Luxe magazine and media appearances on Konkat and Forum Ukrainian television, Turkuiz and TRT Turk Turkish TV channels, and double features in Yen Asir Turkish national newspaper.

The paintings are immensely colorful, usually containing bright neon tones, and are compositionally angled as if peering through urban scenes under an intense flashing light flare shone upon the viewer. Imagine walking down the street in an urban setting and a stranger were to fire a flare gun at your head, the resulting dizzying and colorful vision may appear like a Cern Basarir painting. Cem’s paintings could also be described as having a concussion-like appearance as if the viewer’s vision has been distorted out of focus. Forms of architecture, infrastructure, figures, and aspects of nature are distorted in the paintings as a manner interpreting a reflection of light upon the eye. The stretching of forms are filled in with globs of flat portions of paint, carefully shaped to follow the curve of illumination upon the subjects. These flat observational and abstracted studies create compositions and perspective from forms of color rather than from linearity or contrast.

Comparing and contrasting two works, Izmir Kordon Boyu - Konak II (pictured above) and Ganaraska River, Port Hope (pictured below) both represent urban landscapes with a variety of approaches yet pulled in with consistency. The first observation we may take in would be how the asphalt appears as a clean flat form in Izmir while the road in Ganaraska appears like an explosion of light and color. The painting above has an organic shaped sky with glares from the sun with divided clouds while the painting below depicts a flat background with a shaped mountain in the distance. The similarities in the paintings contain the variations of hot neon pinks and turquoise tones representing forms in light while dark blues reveal darkness and shadow. The paintings portray Cem as a complex colorist and distortionist who uses the curvature of light to help accentuate his vision of abstracted form.

Cem Basarir’s paintings represent dynamic contemporary interpretations of color, perspective, and light in regards to manipulating distortions of the eye towards flat yet representational forms. These exciting urban landscapes offer a different take on city life as a means of colorful intoxication and spreads of neon lights contaminating exterior spaces. The compositions represent lucid and transformative experiences of interactions with light, altering perspective to reflect a sense of enhancement and distortion. Cem does not simply abstract nor represent his subjects, he tries to redefine their visual purpose, focusing the lens on creating what he perceives to be a personally perfected composition. With a resume a mile long, high demand for the sale of his paintings, and a bold, consistent body of work which defies basic notions of illusion and familiar sensory experiences, Cem Basarir’s portfolio will stand the test of time.