Fill in The Plant

Reconsidering green independently from the natural environment that it belongs to... Interpreting
it as a filling material or a landscape element inside the city... In flowerpots scattered on lamp
posts, in ivies planted next to the walls on the side of highways, or in durable but unhappy plants
scattered inside concrete blocks separating different lanes... This fantasy landscape created by an
alla turca aesthetics has, moreover, another dimension taking form in the construction economy.
Symbolic gardens presented as marketing material in housing estates built for the middle class, or
winter gardens established on rooftops of super luxury residences in a grove cut by construction
machines. All of this is part of a series of green peculiarities of city life. But certainly, variations
of peculiarities are not limited to this. Symbolic parks set up inside neighbourhoods or on
roadsides, decorative pools presented as landscape designs, artificial cascades and more... These
areas taking shape as the closest points of escape inside the concrete jungle, at the same time,
form the backbone of hybrid city landscapes.

Reversing, changing, transforming and reinterpreting in her imagination the realities of the city,
presented as a summary above, in her tenth solo narrative entitled “Fill in the Plant”, Burcu
Perçin presents a critical reading in terms of the possibilites of painting. The circulation of the
vegetation as cosmetics in grey areas determining the city and its boundaries forms one of the
starting points in the artist’s new series. Not letting go of the irony peculiar to a painter while
conveying to her canvas the green sceneries, which contradict themselves and becomes estranged
to their essence inside the city, the artist focuses on states of being “as if”, potentially familiar to
the audience in each painting that she creates. In this journey concerning the transformation of
green inside the city, the artist invites her audience to an unintentional journey while on the
canvas she reestablishes spaces belonging to different geographies. Greenhouse images inside the
city indicating the geography of England or the Gardens of Marqueyssac in France with a history
stretching to centuries meet on a common ground in painting together with sceneries collected
from the city that she lives in. In the series mostly consisting of geometric foms with variable
dimensions from nature, rendering visible the oil paint sometimes in layers and sometimes by
letting it flow upon the canvas, the artist proceeds on a path determined by improvisation and
chance in some of her paintings. The series “Fill in the Plant” including six oil paintings of

various sizes as well as two works created with oil paint on photography makes room for the
marble image, also passionately embraced by Perçin in her previous works, in a different way.
Positioned in the middle of artifical green areas, this image includes various connotations from an
abstract marble sculpture to a melting glacier. Within the scope of the exhibition, two new
paintings - successors of the artist’s series “Mountains Have No Owners” dated 2014 and
centering upon detail images from marble quarries - and an abstract relief work consisting of
marble pieces cut in different sizes meet the audience. These works, the technical perception of
which changes according to the distance and which are perceived as abstract forms at close range
but as a whole from a distance, include references from the abstract and partly from the realist
painting tradition.

Burcu Perçin is an artist who has made environmental issues into the main theme in her works
and reflects upon different final feelings conveyed by nature and city images. In 2007 and in the
following three years, she continued her painting adventure - which she began with her solo
exhibition in 2005 by painting human figures inside a wild forest and objects abandoned in nature
- with a range of themes from highway images to abandoned industrial buildings to their indoor
spaces. In 2014 the artist painted the series “Mountains Have No Owners” wherein she illustrated
the destruction of nature through the rent struggle in marble quarries, and in the last two years she
worked on the series entitled “Fill in the Plant”. In her new series, its English title named with
reference to the phrase “Fill in the blanks”, the artist renders visible through the possibilities of
painting the troubled relation of modern man to nature. On one part of the canvas the painter
mirrors constructed urban realities created by developing economies, while on the other part she
sheds light on the lack of green inside the city.

Sami Kısaoğlu, 2017