Oculus (SIGNED)

Yusuf Sevinçli
Oculus (SIGNED)

Photographs: Yusuf Sevinçli

Publisher: Yayinlayan

18 pages

Year: 2017

Comments: Leporello hardcover, 290 x 195 mm. First edition, 2018. Black and white photographs. Design by Kitap Tasamari. Copy signed by the photographer.

"Taking its title from an old Roman architectural term for a small circular or oval window or the round openings found at the center of domes. Often an oculus allows a concentrated beam of light into an otherwise dark interior and so is threshold between a world of light and one of shadow.
In Sevinçli’s images we are in a shadow-world in which light, meaning and beauty pass fleetingly, out of reach and into memory. There is a beautiful, poetic intelligence in Sevinçli’s photographs. They are, we are told images of actual things and places. The artist’s sensibility, however, articulated through the elegant contingencies of the analogue photographic process; the framing of the shot, the manipulation of the negative, the quality of the printing, renders reality dreamlike.
The images are a dream-state, rich with ambiguity and metaphor; A flower, silhouetted, becomes epic and architectural. A white circle painted on a dark ground, the casual record of an act of art making takes on occult significance. A woman pulls skin tight like cloth, another’s eyes sparkle with light. Stream rises, spectral like from the street. A man in movement, arms outstretched, his head hidden from us, is perhaps dancing or falling. Stairs ascend into luminosity and fiction.

The images are a dream-state, rich with ambiguity and metaphor; A flower, silhouetted, becomes epic and architectural. A white circle painted on a dark ground, the casual record of an act of art making takes on occult significance. A woman pulls skin tight like cloth, another’s eyes sparkle with light. Stream rises, spectral like from the street. A man in movement, arms outstretched, his head hidden from us, is perhaps dancing or falling. Stairs ascend into luminosity and fiction."