A CURATORIAL REVIEW

Rezan Özger is an US-based Turkish painter whose practice in oil spans portraiture, the animal figure, cosmic landscape, intimate tree studies, and the thematic territory she has named Sevmek Dokunmaktır — Loving Is Touching. The phrase is not merely a title but a governing proposition, and it illuminates the emotional logic of the entire body of work: painting, for Özger, is a form of contact. The brush touching the canvas is an act of attention, and attention is a form of love.

When she is painting — with canvas before her, colors on her palette, brushes in hand — she gets lost in the world of colors and lines. Time as she knows it stops, the world as she knows it disappears. She mixes into her painting and her colors and comes into being again. The enthusiasm in her heart pours onto the canvas in a multitude of colors and lights. When blending life, love, and nature with her colors, she feels that she is a part of this magnificent and mystical universe.

This is not decorative language. The philosophical seriousness of the Sevmek Dokunmaktır series is evident in the text accompanying it: a sustained meditation on how modern life has severed human beings from physical contact with the world — with soil, with trees, with animals, with each other — and how that severance breeds the violence we do to our environment and to ourselves. The paintings in this strand respond directly: figures that reach toward one another, glances that carry the weight of sustained attention, the warmth of human presence rendered in warm, saturated oil against grounds that glow. The brushwork here is expressive and assured, with color pushed toward emotional intensity rather than tonal accuracy. Skin reads not as flesh but as light-holding surface, warm against cooler backgrounds, the chromatic contrast doing the work of psychological presence.

The portrait work — which spans female and male subjects across several decades — demonstrates a technique built on confident tonal modeling, with a preference for close-up compositions that isolate the face and head against simplified or abstracted grounds. Özger uses color with considerable freedom in the flesh tones: ochres and warm reds in the lights, cool greens and muted purples in the transitions, deep shadows that carry chromatic life rather than simply denoting darkness. The paintings titled Amused, Delighted, and Decisive from the 2023–2024 series signal their ambition in the naming — these are not studies of appearance but of psychological state, the face as evidence of an interior life. The spatula technique Özger developed through her workshops with Davide Frisoni is visible in passages of impasto where paint is applied with a palette knife rather than a brush, building physical relief into the surface that catches light differently depending on the viewing angle. The effect is particularly powerful in the equine paintings and in the cosmic series, where thick, directional marks create a sense of movement and energy that brushwork alone cannot achieve.

The horse paintings form one of the most sustained bodies of work in the portfolio, accumulating across many years. Özger paints horses in motion and at rest, alone and in pairs, in the specific atmospheric conditions of Turkish coastal and rural light. What distinguishes these paintings from conventional equine art is the degree to which the animal functions as emotional subject rather than aesthetic object. The horses are present — psychologically, physically — in a way that reflects the same quality of attention Özger brings to her human portraiture. The coat textures, the musculature, the way light moves across the curved forms of flank and neck: all of this is rendered with the spatula-and-brush combination that has become her signature, building surfaces of considerable physical richness.

The Ufkun Ötesi (Beyond the Horizon) and Cosmos series represent the most recent, and perhaps most formally adventurous, direction in the practice. In these works, the brush travels beyond the horizon, through the universe of which we are a part. Even if we accept that the celestial bodies forming in the brush’s traces are real, their appearance and light come from perhaps thousands of light years ago. Perhaps thousands of light years before they became visible or before they were captured for the first time by objective lenses, they had already transformed into a supernova or ceased to exist as black holes. As part of the universe, she wants to make this universe visible to people.

The cosmic paintings — named for specific astronomical formations: Carina Nebula, Horsehead Nebula, Eagle Nebula, Orion Galaxy, Trifid Nebula — are built from the same emotional premise as the rest of the work, but directed outward into vast, impersonal space. The palette is deep and saturated: dense blacks and indigos punctuated by bursts of magenta, copper-gold, luminous blue, and hot white. The spatula here creates stars and nebular clouds from thick, radiant impasto that genuinely catches light, the physical surface of the painting echoing the optical phenomenon of starlight. It is a formally brave series — the scale of the subject demands humility from the painter, and Özger meets it by attending to the specific visual character of each formation rather than producing generic cosmic atmosphere.

The tree paintings (Ağaçlar) complete the ecological strand of the practice, connecting the cosmic scale back down to the intimate and the terrestrial. Painted with the same warm-palette expressiveness as the portraiture, these trees are not landscape props but presences — individual, particular, alive.

For collectors, this is a practice of considerable emotional and technical range, committed across decades to the proposition that painting is fundamentally an act of connection: between painter and subject, between viewer and image, between the human being and the world that sustains it.

Despina Tunberg

Curator
World Wide Art Books and Artavita
Wwab.us and artavita.com