Serge Mendjisky brings splash of color to Istanbul

ISTANBUL – Hürriyet Daily News

December 16

This December and January Istanbul will see a new variation on urban modernity at Bali art gallery through the eyes of Serge Mendjisky.

After presenting his analytical cubist visions of cities such as Paris, New York, Venice and Moscow, Mendjisky invites us to rediscover the old Constantinople for the close of the Istanbul 2010 Culture Capital of Europe.

Through this new artistic approach, the modern town and the eternal city come together in a kaleidoscope which emphasizes the co-existence of different eras and influences: codes of traditional monuments rub shoulders with ultra-modern architecture of glass and steel, high-rise buildings are juxtaposed with mosques in the hectic atmosphere of everyday life.

In some works, Mendjisky is something of a modern-day Bruegel, inviting us to immerse ourselves in the city’s typical local color and bustling life. Elsewhere, a traditional dance reveals the spinning movements that casts echoes of the earth and sky: the Whirling Dervishes who, in a cascade of blues highlighted by the immaculate white of their skirts, transport us far beyond these domes spangled with mystic gold.

The curves of the mosques also dance, interspersed with the verticality of the technique, which itself enhances and further enlivens the elegant hierarchy of the many minarets which stand out against the blues of the sky.

The motley crowd of Istanbulites is cosmopolitan and active. All over town, it is on the move: around the mosques, on and under the Galata Bridge, at Taksim, a multi-cultural nerve-center which lives around the clock.

With this multiplicity of perspectives, these springboards for flight which we are bound to discover simply through our powers of observation, we penetrate the intimacy of this city of multiple origins, the intimacy of the artist’s vision and the intimacy of a city with many different facets.

The life of the artist Mendjisky can be seen as constant re-invention of the codes of painting, stepping beyond the schools to which he could belong. Born in Paris in 1929, the son of post-Impressionist painter Maurice Mendjisky, he retained from Fauvism the character of an exceptional colorist. Influenced early on by Cézanne and the impressionists, he found his own mode of expression in divisionism, of which he became an emblematic figure, and which he transcended by crossing it with pop art in canvasses with a macro-photographic viewpoint in the 1990s.