Two Candles
Solo exhibition at 400x118 - IMC, Istanbul
February 4th - March 17th 2023
Installation photos by Zeynep Beler and Emin Yu
Exhibition text by Zeynep Beler:
(Click here for the Turkish version)
During a period a few years back that Romina and I were working in tandem at each other’s home-studios, we had a favorite meme that we felt served as a kind of overview of our activities at the time: it features a dewy, Twin Peaks-era Kyle MacLachlan wearing what can comfortably be described as a shit-eating grin, captioned, “I get my news from the only reliable source, cryptic symbolism in my dreams”. It served as a humorous reminder that we returned to whenever we felt our work risked becoming solipsistic, and in looking back, it’s still a good summarizer of the deliberate and almost methodological introspection so many of our generation can be partial to.
In the case of Romina’s work, however, the dreamlike –and often nightmarish– imagery reveals hidden depths and an intuitive modus operandi that’s almost color-coded. Spirals and dark murky bodies of water figure large in her paintings, as well as spaces opening onto other nested spaces and disembodied eyes and hands. Fire is also a common symbol, one that she has told me appears particularly during transitory times when she has the instinctual urges to “resist torpor and lack of light, to warm, keep alive, illuminate and revitalize” things for herself. The painting “Echo”, for instance, features fire that literally appears as a revitalizing agent, wrapping itself like a warm orange blanket around a wan tree trunk suspended in a cold blue expanse. It could simultaneously be thought of as the dying flame after the fire that ravaged the tree, though my reading leans towards the former. This paradoxical duality is evocative of the consuming dynamics between two people, at once dangerous and transformative.
Recently, Romina’s explorations of form found a conspicuous home in ceramics, flat tablets bridging a compensatory distance between painting and sculpture. There is even more corporeal depth in a pair of eyes suspended in a forest or a cold gray room opening onto the squelchy red antechamber of a heart. In however form it appears, I’ve always found this corporeality of Romina’s depiction of elemental forces most captivating - frozen in the act of consuming, her fires literally eat, like a paint stripper, into darkness thick as tar. Their bright yellow and acidic green is complemented with the purplish twilight of her more shadowy paintings, where fire is contained to the light of lamps or a single candle that fails to set the frame alight. These paintings are maybe the resting place before she enters the transitory period, a liminal space preceding action.
The liminality here is more temporal than spatial: more often than not, Romina’s still lives remind me –true millennial style– of video game wait screens. Quit or continue? The game asks as a more muted version of the soundtrack loops contemplatively in the background, and you can wait for however long you want before making your decision. Sometimes you click out to the wait screen just to delay the choice, to gather warmth and oxygen so you can eventually flare into a full-out house fire and start over.
