But a few years ago, when horse chestnut trees all around the world contracted a new disease, a few hundred of these trees were cut down in Paris. When Macedonian painter Ömer Kaleşi, who has been living in Paris for more than 40 years, saw these ancient, enormous and hollowed out tree trunks on the street, he was inspired to prepare another collection of paintings continuing his life-long theme of human heads.Currently adorning the art gallery and the outer walls of the French Culture Center, a collection of Kaleşi's paintings produced over the past 15 years can be seen by art lovers in İstanbul until Oct. 27. The exhibition includes Kaleşi's canvases from the “Balkan Drama,” “Dervishes” and “Shepherds” series, as well as the series inspired by the horse chestnut trees in Paris.
“I have been living in Paris for more than 40 years, but I never worked on a subject related to Paris,” the artist explains in an interview with Today's Zaman. “The trees on the roads affected me a lot and I thought I could pay my debt to this beautiful city by producing a new collection,” he adds. The resulting 50-piece series on this subject features images of human heads on or in these tree trunks. “It is as if, from these still life images, from the dead nature, I mean, comes a new life, new heads,” he says, noting that with this collection, the trees are, in a sense, returning to Turkey.
Kaleşi has always focused on expressing the emotions and troubles of human beings in abstract ways from the very early years of his painting career. A graduate of the İstanbul Fine Arts Academy in Turkey, he was a student of Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu during his university education. Three colors are predominant in his work: red, black and white. He began to include red on his canvases in his university years, but black became more prominent in his work beginning from 1993. His collection “Balkan Drama,” which he painted throughout the long years of war in the Balkans in the '90s, involved the color black quite often.
White came into his paintings first in the form of the clothing of shepherds. “There is this habit of filling the canvas. You cannot find paintings like mine in the world. This is a habit. When you are done with the thing you want to paint, you should not feel obliged to fill the rest,” Kaleşi says while explaining his use of the color white. Following his graduation, he went on a tour of Turkey with his friends and his themes of dervishes and shepherds carry traces from his trips to Anatolia.
Since the head is the most important part of the human body, according to Kaleşi, it has always played an important role in his paintings. “Most likely I will continue to paint heads until I die. The rest is not necessary in a painting, because the head exists by itself. Some people think that the heads in my paintings are decapitated heads, but they are not like that,” the painter stresses, noting that he has never painted even a drop of blood around these heads.
Kaleşi's exhibition, featuring pieces from his most well-known series and collections, will run through Oct. 27 at the French Culture Center in Taksim. For more information, visit www.infist.org.
