Mustafa Horasan, better known by his surname alone, does not walk. He swaggers. And with his overconfident stride, a kindly fellow with an outstretched hand and a cool, trimmed, salt-and-pepper beard, he is dressed like he could be on the cover of a glossy men’s magazine. He appears to be a late boomer, from that generation of children born in the decades immediately following the economic upswing that came after World War II. He faces his younger, a millennial man who might be called a buster, as his peers came of age in a time when the dream of infinite capitalist growth had shattered.

He faces a wall of some six large-sized paintings awash in color schemes that mirror the heavenly spectra of earthly light, from yellowed blacks to greenish pinks, purpled reds and whitened blues. Each bears a central insignia, almost calligraphic, but wholly nonfigurative beyond the semblances of letter, or even the utterance of sound, or meaning, a point of optical focus proportioned to the height of a man. The pieces speak for themselves in a language of silence in which they reflect only themselves.

Horasan has had a long and fruitful career beginning in the late 1980s in the western province of Izmir. He has been known to paint canvases that are reminiscent of the early 20th century’s aesthetic experiments in form, when artists were changing the course of history, reframing the subjectivity of representation from the portraiture and scenography of biblical decoration to more personal, private depictions of their inner emotional and psychological life.

By turning to abstraction, Horasan is proud to have adapted to the course of the world as introspection has gained in significance, by the collective weight of mass withdrawal. It is, for him, an entirely self-absorbed venture, one that flexes his highly skilled creative muscles. But the effect, finally, exudes a sort of gushing solipsism in the face of a growing need for art that prompts sociopolitical dialogue, or at least expresses a yearning for communication, human connection, while enveloped in the sorrows of unending confinement.

But Horasan is ensconced in his paradisiacal isolation, as an artist. His studio, surrounded by ateliers and cafes in the breezy Anatolian quarter of Yeldeğirmeni, holds an impressive archive of his work, not only as a prolific painter, but as a musician and host to what seems to be Istanbul’s bohemian intellectuals whose performative egotism might be as large as the violent, mammoth brushstrokes that he’s concocted for his current exhibition, which poses his artwork as part of the canonical stretch of geniuses going back to Bosch, Goya and Monet.

Up close and impersonal

It is said that the tragedy of Mark Rothko was not that his terminal illness was already overwhelming him by the time he took his own life, but that he could not break a vicious circle, one that had kept him locked within the pattern of his unrelenting sense of failure. His late work is large-scale, fit for the walls of a hotel, or a mansion. He was, at last, painting only for the rich when he had long strived for the instantaneous universality of emotion, simply of a reaction, any and all, that might breach the rigid borders of criticism and history to reach hearts.

Now, fifty years later, Horasan is producing abstract paintings that come across as mere painterly exercises, a man working out in front of an audience. Horasan has argued that abstraction has always been present throughout art history. He demonstrated as much by cutting out a square border from a sheet of white printer paper in his studio office, opening a book of Diego Velazquez paintings on his well-stocked bookshelf and showing how details of the paintings can be seen as abstract works unto themselves.

His methodology, however, is about as sophisticated as a climate change denier pointing to a thermometer on a cold, winter’s day. But he’s been out of the academy for a while. And behind the doors of his studio, sheltered by the sound of Anatolian instruments and the hefty precedent of his reputation as a senior artist, his approximation of Monet, for example, comes off as simultaneously virtuosic and yet utterly flat, as if he might have had an alter ego as a successful forger.

Ultimately, his latest series of abstract works is imposing in its spectacle of improvisational form, merging palettes with the foresight and ingenuity of a careful, and perceptive practitioner of paint mixing and action brushing. Yet for all of his precision a seer might beg the question why, and what is it for? Abstraction itself has become nothing more than a mechanical copy of its once sensational arrival on the art scene about a century ago. Before that, as is clear in every major art museum, pictures were only ever figurative.

Then came photography, and modernism, and the role of the image was displaced by its ability to remake it so much so that the only difference was its presence, and the power of representation itself, the power to represent others’ faces, the nameless objectification of bodies against the faces of elites, or scenes of their leisure, or of workers and their factories, minorities and their struggles. Everyone clashed over formal painting, until the levy broke and the artist smeared the surface of their canvas like the aftermath of a civil battlefield.

To break one’s fast

As part of its commitment to remote accessibility, and with concerns over the ensuing course of the pandemic, Artcrowdistanbul has appropriately mounted a virtual exhibition of the latest works by Horasan, "About Anger, Justice and Serenity." Linked to a digital exhibition room that can be explored through the internet and coordinated by the curator Melike Bayık, the founder and director of Artcrowdistanbul Şanel Şan Sevinç occasionally then invites people to come and see the works for themselves, in person, at Horasan’s studio.

Yet, the tone of special invitation breeds an exclusivity that feels as if they are capitalizing on a copyist’s homage to abstraction. And once having arrived at Horasan’s studio, the works are not displayed anything like they are online. Instead, Horasan is there to explain as if he were Bosch, Goya or Monet wrapped into one. But he is not, and his paintings are not like those of the ingenious aesthetic and conceptual innovators whose shoulders he claims to stand on. And if they are, it is too difficult to tell, because his originality remains in the shadows against those whose singular lights have not dimmed but shine brighter with age.