ALI CHERRI

Rendered with controlled yet fluid brushwork, Cherri’s watercolors exude a kind of effortless realism. They are startling in their quietude, seductive in their beauty and deeply in conversation with his broader practice. In the series “Dead Inside” (2021-ongoing), for instance, deceased fauna—foxes, fish, birds—alongside wrecked automobiles summon echoes of Andy Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series (1962–67). In “We Grow Thorns So Flowers Would Bloom” (2023), depictions of prickly-pear cacti, rendered with a scientific precision reminiscent of Hilma af Klint’s botanical works, appear at once diagrammatic and radiant. Encountering them, I was gobsmacked by their disarming elegance and deceptive simplicity. Again, I am utterly obsessed.

Motifs from these works resurface in The Watchman (2023), Cherri’s oneiric film following a Turkish-Cypriot soldier—Sergeant Bulut—stationed at the border of the unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. In the film, the lanky, blue-eyed soldier ritualistically buries robins that repeatedly collide with the glass of his watchtower. Later, he passes a withering wall of prickly-pear cacti—plants historically used as border markers throughout the Mediterranean. The film concludes with Bulut spotting a troupe of larger-than-life, lost soldiers marching along the night horizon. When he asks whether he will return if he marches with them, silence follows. The brigade turns back, and the film cuts to black.[...]

— Terence Trouillot, senior editor of Frieze