Deniz Bayav composes her paintings by valuing oppositions and contrasts. Cultivating an observant attitude during her walks closer to nature, the artist approaches plants, most of the time at ground level. Her gaze settles on the differences and variations of state, between life and death, between the changing colors of foliage and its renewal.

She draws our attention to the cycle of life within nature, the impermanence of life, which is continually renewed. Her artistic practice follows in the footsteps of the vanities of Simon Renard de Saint-André, Pieter Claesz and the works of the painters of the Barbizon school. She maintains a sensitive relationship with the forest as an environment in which to fully experience the cycle of the seasons. In nature, she looks for contrasts, relationships between natural materials in the process of transformation. From her own photographs, she creates compositions for which she favors a balance between elements of different natures. She thus reveals space-times where a maximum of possible changes are perceived. Her paintings show details of plants in different colors, whose contrasts are enhanced by the play of light and shadow. Our gaze can then move across the canvas and settle down to linger on the study of leaves, often diseased or eaten away by insects. We can also apprehend the various characteristics of plants in relation to their environment. We think of the leaves that fall naturally, forming a carpet that will gradually decompose to become humus: a process that makes the soil rich and alive. Hence an awareness of the depth of the soil and the invisible life that takes place there. The artist invites us to slow down our daily rhythm in order to appreciate the living in its process of transformation, while remaining at a fair distance.

Deniz Bayav is also interested in the flow of water and its encounter with plants and other organisms. Her paintings bear witness to the power of this element, its paradoxes, at once a source of life, nourishing and destructive. These show interactions between water and light. They express a fleeting moment during which everything seems to be in motion. On some, through reflections, relationships between trees and leaves are perceived. Others suggest the process of regeneration and decomposition of the plant.

Sometimes, the artist composes micro landscapes from found elements that she then take its photo to create gaps between two temporalities. Several paintings reveal plants that are both fragile and resistant, emerging from the snowy ground. Her pictorial works embody a suspended time, from which to think about the return of the sun and heat.

In Deniz Bayav’s works, light enhances the possibilities of fully appreciating the permanent evolution of natural elements and allows to consider the interdependencies within ecosystems.

Her watercolors make visible the growth of plants, their vitality through a contrast between the inert and the living. The association between a plant at the end of its life and marble echoes our use of flowers to honor our dead. The artist also gives a presence to the wilted flowers to which she has become attached and whose beauty she preserves, symbols of eternity and timelessness. Her engravings also express a  state in suspense, a stopped time and leave to imagine new germinations. Tree diseases and withering will then come new shoots.

Different emotions alternate in front of her works. They encourage to become aware of the passing of time as much as to hope for renewal : an eternal restart that inspires patience, wonder and attention to every moment. This exhibition invites a drift of the gaze, to let yourself be carried by the color relationships, the play of light and shadow and the visual circulations between elements that oppose each other while conversing together.

Pauline Lisowski, art critic and member of AICA

Translation of the text: Deniz Bayav

See Eternal Recurrence Series