Nejat Satı: Wild Flowers

After having adopted black for a few years for social and aesthetic reasons (Light in the Dark, 2017), Nejat Satı returns to color in full force with this exhibition. The paintings represent the artist’s recent observations of appearance, characteristics and nature of colors, taking his inspiration directly from wildflowers. These so-called wild plants can adapt to and thrive in extreme environments and have no need whatsoever for humans to exist. To study their color tones, Sati started observing nature surrounding his studio located in the heart of rural Turkey, with the help of a serendipitous old botanic book.

Nejat Satı works in a manner reminiscent of art, magic, and science happening all at once. He takes small samples of color tones from the area where the petals join the reproductive parts of the flower, and names them according to the original Latin nomenclature of flower anatomy. When transferring these small color samples onto the canvas, Sati’s imagination, aesthetics, intellect and spirituality converge and become a starting point for his inquest into existence. Moreover, as is evident in his previous abstract series Nefs(2014) and Structure(2012), they attain a sense of movement and dimension that is so specific to his works, revealing a higher being or experience to which Sati feels they belong.

The capability of these plants to endure the most challenging situations and to provide permanence to their species by appealing to both humans and animals by means of their hypnotizing color displays, plays a role in the artist’s approach to color as an existential condition per se. These color spectra from the plants we see are a result of the permanent plant life cycle of blossoming and fading, like birth and death. It is thus through colors that Satı seeks a possible manifestation of essence in our existence.