ATTRACTION

Kıymet Giray*

The desire to be noticed is one of the essentials of human life. This desire changes keeping its meaning under all conditions and starts from most inward-looking behaviours and goes up to screams ‘I’m here, take notice of me’. Even hiding, concealing and keeping a low profile is a kind of desire to be get notice, just as standing out in the crowd, jumping out and up and making much ado. Both phenomena are just a reflection of the motivation to be noticed and to be different regardless of before and after. These are merely indicators of desire to be different, to stay out of lines; to distinguish himself/herself from the universal and from everybody and not to go along with the group; manifest himself/herself and be subjective as an individual, and, beyond that, be unaccessible or even to be one of a kind.

Attractive power of being unaccessible and one of a kind is analyzed with attraction. It is analyzed with charm, swagger, show-off and good manners. Being charming, swaggering, attractive and appealing creates attributes which reinforce the meaning of attraction. Such attributes drive an individual towards the goal marked as jumping up to higher class and are a good match with the meaning of going from one place to another.

In her paintings, Başak Bugay endeavours to analyze the attraction of being unaccessible and one of a kind with an irony-laden approach. She opens phenomena of charm, swagger, show-off and good manners to discussion in a plastic language. She questions the challenging chaos caused by attraction with an interpretation resting on hard and definite lines and visualizes this chaos with an attractive irony. She adds subjective interpretations, enriched with perceptions derived from life snap-shots of the 21st Century Istanbul, to this social phenomenon which has been experienced in all ages of the human history and which has always found its reflections in the history of arts.

She picks up what’s going on in our inner circles, what’s there all the time and what’s shown us all the time and reflects them after getting processed with her subjective perceptive selection. She directs her attention towards attraction and effort to create attraction and arrives at and recognizes of consciousness of that thing and she, thus, gives them a pictorial expression.

Bugay questions impressions driven on mind by outer world’s sensational influences and then pictures extension, from one person to another, through magnetic waves and soundwaves, of such influences which are likely to determine the unaccessibility going out of line and which sets its aim as being attractive. She cares about influences of the world of attraction on human senses, especially the sighting, and she marks their reflections on artificial minds so created and structured. She underlines artificial happenings, objects and situations of the Attraction setting desired to be created.

She opens to discussion the contributions of artificial memory, created by being tempted by attraction of the unaccessibility, to rootless quantities, as well as the complex and objective mind content which come to light under such sensational impression. Especially thanks to her visual perceptions, she exhibits descriptions of figures, things and objects as regards their form and situation.

Through figurative exressions she picks up among the larger human groups of society serving the same function and providing the same benefit and living under the same conditions, Bugay’s paintings aim to direct attention to concept of attraction and to get insights into that thing through the senses. Driven by objects in the outer world and having a perception associated with them, Bugay endeavours to make inroads into realities, spiritual situations and spiritual acts of the inner world and thus reflects perceptions about them in her paintings.

07.03.2010 Ankara

Prof. Dr. Kıymet Giray      

A.U.DTCF. Department Chair of History of Arts