"Please note. This is not a political exhibition. Thank you for your understanding."
Our contemporary era is rife with tensions and violent confrontations, from the war in Ukraine to the upsurge in nationalism around the world. Militia, the exhibition's masterpiece, shows two soldiers shaking hands. Is it an armistice or a white peace? The two men belong to the army, but their uniforms, which relate to different eras, seem to imply that the past haunts the present in an ever more frenetic concatenation. The handwritten maxim on the Forward the Revolution canvas seems to be a warning. Peoples live and die, but wars are always the same, initiated for the same territorial, nationalist or economic claims…
The cyclical time of history, like that of humanity, is an eternal restart after its extinction. Modern states, however advanced, learn nothing from their mistakes and human losses. History seems condemned to repeat itself, because "man is a wolf to man", as Hobbes put it: human beings can only rely on an all-powerful guardian to whom they delegate their rights and who assigns them their duties. Today's states have taken the place of this Hobbesian Leviathan.
Eser Gündüz's research back-and-forth between past and present, form and writing, painting in the art-historical tradition and work created by artificial intelligence, makes him part of a timeless, universal total art approach. Each element of his compositions responds to a formal or structural necessity, what the artist calls "architectural morphology". The artist is a free spirit and a visionary. He conveys his message by hijacking objects and concepts. In this way, he offers viewers the chance to reconstitute the message and develop their own questioning.
