Ali Altın & Özlem Altın
We sing with our light

A guidance for today? Özlem Altın incorporates media images into her collages. In this exhibition, however, she also sees herself as the guardian of her late brother Ali’s artistic legacy, following his untimely death. At Caprii, she presents only a few works – as a gatekeeper, so to speak, haunted by the many visions of her brother and of herself. She opens a view onto Ali’s visual world through her own enigmatic collages that appear like sculptures emerging from the media-based realm of their genesis. They appeal to eye and ear alike – in an expanded sense – offering ways of representing something unknown: as though seen through X-rays or heard in tonalities we must first learn to decipher.

And Ali Altın’s paintings? His work conjures painterly visions of beings calling themselves human, seeking to leave their presence on this planet with the imprint of the "Anthropocene." Like medieval pictorial motifs transformed into Disney comics, rendered in stark realism or shamanistically animalised, these figures inhabit unknown realms where they lead unknown lives, side by side with animals. Lives that nevertheless seem familiar to us. Parties, danse macabre, aliens, Halloween – only seemingly superficial.

The shadows of the ancient underworld have long since receded, though as part of our shared cultural memory they remain ever-present in art, from Caravaggio to Goya, from Symbolism to Max Beckmann. Sometimes fractured, frayed, or blurred – but still vivid in dreams and hallucinations. Plato’s cave, a fabricated state of human perception, can still be sensed in the precious blue – once derived from Afghan lapis lazuli, rare and costly. In Ali’s work, however, it is more the atmosphere of yellow, green, and purple in which one moves as if “blue,” in the sense of Ernst Barlach’s expressionist play Der blaue Boll: magically grotesque or surreally comical.

Created in Düsseldorf during a time when, particularly in Germany, the grey zones of visual art were subject to sociological scrutiny, Ali’s paintings come across as spontaneous, even though they emerged through lengthy processes. The philosopher Hans Blumenberg once spoke of the “reality of the invisible” – not as a phantasm, but as a reality built from concepts that, like the cave in Plato’s allegory, generate and illuminate life artificially. Could this be what we mean by modernity? Carnival becomes a vision of Hades as Elysium, in which a shadowy society is drawn, dualistically, into the light. A framework like a panel painting – artistically encoding what might otherwise remain unseen.