“I’M A MINDLESS IDIOT”: THE FREEDOM OF FRIENDSHIP
“Nothing is more suitable to nature than friendship,” says Cicero. Indeed, friendship that develops and grows efortlessly, deepens and endures with effort, has a transformative feature at every stage of life. Especially in adulthood, when our character, lifestyle and perspective of life take shape, and we progress with a certain purpose, new friends who enter our lives, share their ideas, and with whom we can express ourselves freely become even more significant. If our friends are also our colleagues, accompanying our lives with similar concerns, dreams or ideals, these ties evolve into an exchange relationship that transforms us on a professional level and improves our work. The exhibition you are currently in primarily stems from friendship and the convergence of ideas. Featuring works by André Butzer, Mehmet & Kazım, John Newsom, Hell Gette, and Adrian Altıntas, the show creates a meeting atmosphere that spans all floors of Pilevneli by including artists who are friends with André Butzer, a German artist who combines American pop culture and expressionism. Proposed by Mehmet & Kazım, known for their world of hip-hop, breakdance and graffiti, the exhibition was developed with the participation of John Newsom and finally Hell Gette and Adrian Altıntas, and is organized around a large work created by Butzer specifically for the display. The title of the exhibition, chosen by Butzer, is borrowed from the English song 'I’m a mindless idiot' by The Meat Puppets. These words, which ironically highlight the talent, power, and creativity of the artists featured in the exhibition through an ironic contrast, add a more humorous and surprising perspective to the narrative. The artistic and friendly bond among all the artists creates a closeness in their commitment to and approach to art, despite the differences in their painting languages.
André Butzer, known for his colorful characters, often defined by their comic-book style, wide-opened eyes and large heads, approaches the Pop Art medium and transfers the vast world of industrial culture and contemporary symbols onto the surface. His large-scale neo-expressionist works of colorful canvases, in which he uses paint very thickly, represent a flexible style often described as “sci-fi expressionism” that stands between abstraction and figuration. This time, Butzer produces a large-scale watercolor artwork for the exhibition, utilizing his unique style. Using only a simple color palette of tones like pink, red, and yellow, the artist draws lines on a white surface, placing six characters with big eyes and heads that we recognize from his works. With these mischievously looking heads turned left and right, they likely represent all his artist friends included in the exhibition. By positioning itself at the center of the exhibition and developing the narrative around it, this artwork makes a reference to anonymous, sensitive souls who look at the world with curiosity, derive nourishment from irony and creativity, and sometimes empower each other through teasing and having fun, while collectively sharing the power, responsibility and joy of art and painting.
Mehmet & Kazım, who conceived the idea for the exhibition and serve as its invisible curators, are artists who share a similar visual language and attitude with André Butzer. The creative cousins' provocative world of hip-hop, breakdance, and graffiti incorporates various motifs, lyrics, comic symbols, and slogans from this culture. Between March and September 2022, the duo relocated to New York to add a new dimension to their art, incorporating new symbols and signs inspired by the city into their works. Additionally, facing economic constraints and their studio's unsuitability for large-scale canvases and oil paints, they began using charcoal, resulting in monochrome pieces. Following the development of this technique in 2022, their new series produced in 2024, covering one floor of the exhibition, typically feature a single figure in a single frame. The compositions allow us to focus on the expressions of this character and the symbols it carries, characterized by large eyes similar to those used by Butzer, which convey surprise, mischief, or anxiety as they look left and right. At times, these characters even dissolve into a gray cloud of dust, becoming a homogeneous blur, symbolizing a struggle with the fear of being erased at any moment, at the threshold between existence and disappearance.
On the top floor of the exhibition, closest to the sky, we are greeted by John Newsom's imposing, powerful, and impressive bird portraits. In one of the six compositions, we see a falcon in flight. The falcons, the main figures in the paintings, are set against a background defined by a transition of colors—blue, yellow, orange, and red—evoking the hope and excitement of a sunrise. They stand out with their noble and magnificent posture, bright eyes, and classical portrait-like compositions. Newsom, primarily known for his nature studies and his ability to create worlds teeming with greenery and animals in his paintings, is recognized for his art that aesthetically portrays important human themes through animal allegories, such as struggle, escape, nourishment, cooperation, and courage. One reason the artist chose to depict falcons specifically for this exhibition is the historical symbolism associated with birds of prey, which have often been used as metaphors for the highest ideals in spirit and intelligence across world cultures. Contrary to the concept of 'I am a Mindless Idiot,' Newsom sees the bird of prey as a perfect objective image to focus on. He presents these large-scale oil paintings with a poster/banner aesthetic, aiming to inspire viewers towards intellectual and spiritual enlightenment, or at the very least, to aspire towards their higher selves, dreams, and goals. Similar to the singularity found in Mehmet & Kazım's works, each composition features a single bird figure. Once again, as in the images of other artists, prominent features include big eyes and intense gazes.
Hell Gette's works, which typically forge a unique visual universe, even crafting semi-digital landscapes using digital tools such as Photoshop, computer games, and emoji icons, are situated one floor below John Newsom's. The artist distinguishes herself with adept transitions between digital and analog mediums, thereby enriching the techniques and perspectives of her fellow artists. These landscapes contain significant references to the pervasive influence of digital experiences—television, phones, advertisements, social media—on our lives, and the consequent domination of our visual realm, evoking a chaotic sense of entertainment. Rather than critiquing, Gette presents these influences as observations, employing the materials of this digital world in a flexible manner. She works in plein air watercolor, paints on iPhone or iPad, and creates abstractions from nature depictions using Photoshop. After painting the resulting images in oil, she photographs them and adds emojis using mobile apps, before transferring them back to canvas with oil paint. The artist's participation in the exhibition stems from her friendship with Mehmet & Kazım, emphasizing that she collaborated on the paintings while residing in the same New York building as them. This narrative of friendship behind the paintings, and the physical collaboration among the artists during the production process, imbues the collaboration with a sense of camaraderie. In addition to Gette's more densely populated compositions, her triptych #Woke Phase I-III, which centers on an eye and ironically reflects its movement in phases, establishes an imaginary connection with the other artists, once again emphasizing the theme of the ‘eye’.
The works of Adrian Altıntas, on the bottom floor, are positioned as “a kind of root tree” of this unity, as Mehmet & Kazım put it. Adopting a simpler and more abstract language compared to other artists characterized by figures and colors, Altıntas's 'cut-outs' enliven the space, creating a white surface often textured with the painting's own materials. With shifting shades of white, strong and deep cuts in the panel, surfaces ranging from reflective planes to bubbly protrusions, and hints of his hand's use, Altıntas's paintings embody experiences of imagination or experimentation with the nature of the material. In the series included in the exhibition, the artist focuses on more obvious materials that directly refer to the nature of painting, such as cotton and chalk, establishing a strong connection with the organic. While emphasizing traces of vitality through cuts in the fabric and gestures made with chalk, he also investigates the nature and essence of painting and materials. Some works integrate their own texture as well as the texture of the floor or wall into this visuality with minimal use of color and cut compositions, while some transform into mask-like forms, evoking a facial expression whose eyes are determined by only two holes. The fact that such a simple composition using two cuts gains a strong expression is strengthened by the unity with the other artists and the emphasis on the eyes, resulting in a different interpretation.
All the artists embrace each other with the bonds of friendship and continue to follow each other with curious eyes, wandering between the floors and being inspired and liberated by their power.
