Nazim Ünal Yilmaz: Brushman

Nazim Ünal Yilmaz’s paintings are portraits of a colonial race. Those exhausted from the standing start know exactly who they are and exactly where they’re going. The rules of the race are not permanent. No competing force, so ridiculous as to kick a turtle, could outlast one who remembers to slow and consider song, to humble oneself on their knees to look down upon their reflection in a pool. The leaders degrade the practice of self reflection to meet the mirror upright where they’ve mounted their regal likeness, where they spread their flesh and crane their necks to look inward. So the Brushman escapes from reality. His face turns confident as he avoids the fight, the catastrophe of burning branches that not even the horses can outrun. He tries, but he is not big enough, as has been decided by the court. He is a bearded baby that can see through the guide’s fingered blindfold down to the signing of a contract. He paints the red nose of a liar beneath tired eyes that know the truth.

Yilmaz uses the symbol of the clock, the arrow, in futuristic renderings of the impossible upward speed thrust upon the East by Western colonial forces. The artist’s wooden mannequin hurdles towards Modernism just in time to catch up to the border. Its limbs are shredded from its figure in the process, leaving an incomplete model in the classroom. The second hand tears through the canvas. You’re late. You’re the villain. The tomcat can never catch the mouse, and good thing, that loser. His nature is the barrier between him and pleasure under the law, and in this courtroom, you’ll never be XXL. The tension will grow, but there is no release under the reign of repression.

There is solace in a smoke by the full moon, the observation of a horse, blue in lunar glow. We can laugh at the absurdity of military trained dolphins, of surveillance whales. Still, the Greco Roman temple replaces the endemic flora while the workers disappear into the landscape, and each stone laid is a reification. And as long as the snowman, rich and fat, can not see himself, he will climb the mountain of his manhood pointing at the tomcat, the human that can’t keep up with the horse, the big other villain, until he is forced to kneel, melting into the pool of his likeness.

—Toniann Fernandez