cityspaces

The essence of space 1

For me, the city is not merely a physical environment or a landscape to be observed; it is one of the fundamental layers of human existence. Just as the body, the home, and the neighborhood shape our experience of being in the world, the city constitutes another existential layer through which that experience is formed. This body of work emerges from my engagement with this dimension of human existence.

The places I choose are not important because of the streets or buildings themselves, but because of their relationship to the experiences and points of reference that inhabit our everyday memory. They are places recognized less by their official names than by their associations: the alley behind the university, the street with the well-known pizza shop, across from the gallery, or any location that has become embedded in our minds through a shared experience. These informal ways of naming are part of how we inhabit the city, remember it, and construct meaning within it.

These paintings are not documentary images of the city. What unfolds within them is my lived experience of inhabiting these spaces—where observation, memory, and emotion become inseparable. They do not seek to record what I have seen, but to reconstruct what has remained with me after the experience of a place. In this process, forms, colors, and details are transformed, not to describe a location with accuracy, but to evoke the quality of presence and the emotional resonance that these spaces have left in my memory.

Ultimately, this series reflects on the relationship between the human being and the city—a city understood not simply as a surrounding environment, but as an integral dimension of human existence. Within this view, places acquire their identity not through geographical coordinates, but through relationships, associations, and lived experience. These experiences settle into memory and, through painting, re-emerge not as representations of reality, but as reconstructions of what endures from the experience of living in the city.