Fabricated Love: Emre Özakat, Andrei Nițu, Tom Solty

Emre Özakat investigates the anxieties of living in a world that is excessively politicized and media hyper-saturated with increasingly omnipresent surveillance through a mixed-media practice. The artist often questions the credibility of the digital image in the 21st century through various methods of obscuring or manipulating digital images from the virtual and tangible realms.

Mythology arose as a tool to explain the unexplainable. It was historically fabricated to justify adoration, anger, and murder. Once humans had engineered gold, glass, and later plastic, mythical narratives had to be fabricated again. At one point mythology was there to justify weather, catastrophe, and other hyperobjects belonging to the eternal, godly realm. Via technological progress, humans started to forge unusual objects worthy of divine status. Even in its early forms, the brilliance of glass was unexplainable even to the glassmith. They, who manipulate opaque sand into clear glass, could be seen as possessing an almost alchemical power. The emergence of plastic in the modern era symbolizes a new phase in this narrative. Plastic, a material distant from its organic compounds, represents a departure from the natural to the synthetic, a testament to the extent of human control over the material world. In historical contexts, phenomena that eluded rational explanation often served as a catalyst for the genesis of numerous stories and legends. This pattern reflects a fundamental aspect of human nature: the inclination to weave stories around elements that reside beyond the boundaries of contemporary understanding. By abstaining from providing explicit explanations for the content of my paintings, I aim to perpetuate this tradition. I cut any pre-existing relationship with the painting once it is finished, and I start a new one, as if I never knew it, free of preconceptions.

'The paintings I will miss you when you are gone and I will miss you when you are gone II are outcomes of my practical research on light, whether it’s natural or not, and the state of indecision. Both phenomena bridge prediction with the unexpected, serving as a conduit between my inner fears and doubts and fleeting moments of relief and elation, like rainfall after a period of drought. The devotion to nature and its connected fascination also generates a conscious examination of how we live today.

Consequences provoked by my very own decisions often leave a sensation like Weltschmerz and grapple with deep-rooted feelings of guilt and apathy. The paintings Imperial Motors and Imperial Motors II are more connected to that very chaotic and uncontrollable condition within which we find each other lost and awkwardly vulnerable.'