
Berke Doğanoğlu
“Beach” carries an unspecified quality found in other paintings from the same series: the body and the landscape depicted here could be anyone and anywhere. While the lack of contextual specificity enhances the painting’s abstract quality, a temporal experience emerges from the movement of brush marks, shades and partially lit fragments of skin. The painting is really about the moment of emergence, of surfacing of one body out from another, a human torso emerging out from a body of water. The focus is on the mass of the body and clay-like quality of flesh; moldable by time and gravity. The tones - muted grays, transient blues, dirty pinks and fleshy beiges - shift in a fine balance, expressing a state of transition between skin and water, textile and body, environment and atmosphere. A dorsal landscape appears with its stratum and folds, resembling a topography rendered fluid through light and water.