Styling the biographies by seeking the mystery behind them, surrealist painter Vahap Aydoğan creates unique forms of people by discovering their stories.
"Everyone lives the utopia that they have established by constructing the limits of human life," he says. His perception of art and paintings are sometimes integrated with biographies, while they sometimes revolve around the deformation of people's soul perceptions.
He believes that the best way to blend love, emotion, affection, and hope in one canvas is through stylizing a person's life journey. The biographies that he draw takes on the breaking moments of the roles that life sanctioned on them.
"Life is like a film strip. Intense and completely abstract as the curtain of a theater stage," he says, highlighting his philosophy of art based on the principle that death is a truth in every process in which birth exists, and that people convey to him the memories they have collected throughout their lives.
At first, Aydoğan doesn't have any prior information about the life story of the person he is about to draw. Instead, he starts by asking 20 or imprompt/written questions to the person.
By communicating through written language without verbal or visual, he filters the answers and then transfers the images to the canvas. Just as a writer writes biography and collects data, Aydoğan mirrors the life journeys of people beginning from the day they were born until today, by bridging past and present.
"It takes courage and great confidence for someone to unfurl their private lives to a person whom they have never met," he explains. Within the scope of this trusted bond, he seeks to discover the images of the person's dreams that stretch until today and even tomorrow.
"I can observe happiness when the ideal self coincides with the real self, and sadness as the difference between self-conflicts increases in the works. One describes their quest by following a path on this line and exists with their utopia. In this process, one has to decide between what they want to see or whether they want a real confrontation. This is a great dilemma," he remarks highlighting that all people carry these dilemmas, binary concepts as the two sides of the coin.
For this reason, Aydoğan's efforts to create an endless and layered image of his subjects based on a story of the soul blend the emotional aspect with the physical look of his works.
Meanwhile, Aydoğan does not have a particular effort to stylize these paintings as surreal or draw portraits. He just embarks on a journey to see the mystery, say to unsay, and seek eternity. He defines it as a process that develops completely as a result of experience.
Aydoğan was born in Mardin, southeastern Türkiye where many ancient civilizations were formed. Having been interested in the magical world of forms since his childhood, he has been involved with art for about 22 years. Also, from his earlier collections, he had surveys on the human anatomy, deforming an object and reflecting it from a different perspective. As these experiences shed light on his technique, his work and style have matured over the years.
"If there is a character and a style in art, it is a path. You don't take that path as it already belongs to you anyway, and you are the path itself, not the traveler," he defines style and art. He also believes that in art or other professions, people travel on a white, gray, and black plane while he thinks he is still at the end of the gray area and the beginning of the black area. "Experience and time are the biggest factors in the formation of my style," he adds.
There are indispensable parts of his work. Traces of cracked, arid, even droughty Anatolian lands, human silhouettes, and shadows are some of them.
"We regard the canvas as a blank slate, you can fill it with a thought, a landscape, a still life, it's up to you. Yet I take incredible pleasure in stylizing a person's life story on that canvas and rendering it surreal and this enjoyment turns into an incredible source of motivation for me," he remarks.
