NEZIR AKKUL (ÇEPO)

Landscapes completed in the near present, yet rooted in the depths of consciousness. They feel as if distilled from a snowy winter morning, drawn out slowly, patiently, into existence. In the cold austerity of the studio, within a deliberate and almost sacred silence, the landscapes come to life.

Behind the paintings, unfolds the great fault lines of civilisation: history and fiction, memory and transmission, what is told and what disappears. On the surface, Çepo reaches a new threshold in his aesthetic search, inhabiting the uncertain territory between figuration and abstraction. Each canvas is built through an ultraviolet harmony that provokes a momentary blindness. Everything exists at this edge, between seeing and not seeing, between presence and disappearance.

Çepo works in quiet permeability with his surroundings, both physical and spiritual. The world seeps into the image. What he paints carries the residue of what is closest to him, like sediment, like a trace, like memory itself. The images absorb the spirit of the soil from which they rise and open, here and now, onto the artist’s enigmatic inner landscape. In earlier works, the city prevailed: congestion, noise, the disorientation of crowds. Now, having stepped away from the urban sphere, something has shifted. Silhouettes dissolve into fields of colour. Crowds give way to vast emptiness. Plains stretch endlessly toward the horizon, ridges gather behind them, and roads appear whose origins and destinations remain unknown. Winter settles everywhere. These stripped, mesmerising landscapes feel traversed again and again, watched with contemplation, with unease, with the quiet sensation of losing one’s way.

The paintings are monumental, almost overwhelming, yet the images themselves are reduced to an unsettling simplicity. The surface is ruled by dizzying expanses of void. Far away, a few fragile details: a road without direction, a solitary tree, perhaps an abandoned utility pole. A mood turned inward, folded onto itself. Fog thickens the air. Snow covers the ground like a shroud. And an ultraviolet light dazzles both the eyes and the mind. It is the stillness before the storm, or perhaps its aftermath, when a flood has already washed away every trace. We find ourselves nowhere, in the nowhere of a land without coordinates. The landscape has no name. The earth has no past.

Behind the fog, beneath the silence of the snow, stories lie buried. Some have fallen silent. Some have been forgotten. Some have yet to happen, and yet all seem destined to vanish. It feels like the opening pages of a tragic novel, or the abandoned set of its film adaptation. Has the shooting begun? Has it already ended? Was it cancelled by the snow? The scenarios that spill from the artist’s inner sigh remain hidden within the landscapes themselves.

In Snowblind, calm does not arise from the absence of sound; it emerges from the muting of stories. Silence stands before us like a monument. What if we entrusted everything to time, took no notes, wrote nothing down, chose not to remember, forgetting not by accident but as an act of protection? Would the earth still keep the stories we left behind? Would history take root here too? When the snow melts in spring, what remnants might surface? Could a novel still be born from these fragments? Might the silence break if a wandering dengbêj passed by, whistling a solitary tune?

And when the next winter comes, will the blinding light of the snow once again burn the gaze, and then the mind?

Courtesy Zilberman, Istanbul/Berlin. Text: Yekhan Pınarlıgil.