Burnt Palaces
Ezgi Bakçay
from somewhere and they will not get anywhere, Gökhan Gökseven’s paintings leave the spectator uncoordinated. A tooth fallen off the body, may be the visible evidence of an intense physical pain. Or both; the symbolic and the organic record of a wisdom tooth pain. However, it’s not actually the tooth which aches. Its bonelike structure is insensitive to pain, it only aches where it is buried. That’s why a tooth does not try to replace the pain but just signifies it. By scanning, replicating and transforming the wisdom teeth – which we do not know to whom it belongs – into cut glass sculptures, Can Küçük creates an ice-cold distance between pain and the representation of pain. Finally, the absence of pain which has lost its uniqueness is being exhibited above high pedestals; just as the artist’s burnt books, which he generated without including fire. Can Küçük multiplies a burnt book using a 3D printer. He produces the burning, the annihilation, over and over again. Thereby, the rough and cold imagery of the act of burning a book substitutes the warm vulnerability of a black paper which would fall apart with a quick blow. Lacan has a notion which he named the “quilting points” (“points de capiton”). According to him, on the surface of the linguistic structure, just like a quilted quilt, a
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