Who is Sibel Keçeli? (1995-Kırıkkale)She was born in 1995 in Kırıkkale. She graduated from Ankara Atatürk Girls’ Technical and Vocational High School, Department of Graphics and Photography in 2012. She started studying at Kırıkkale University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Painting in 2018. She graduated from the faculty as the top student in 2022. In 2023, she received Pedagogical Formation Education at Gazi University, Faculty of Education. In 2023, she started her MA in Painting Department at Ankara Hacı Bayram Veli University, Institute of Graduate Education and is still continuing.Art Perspective;
Keçeli identifies herself as a whole in her inner world in her works and reflects this to the outer world accordingly. The most basic source she resorts to during this action is her imagination. She reflected the process of defining herself in the series of trees she called “Symphony of Loneliness”. She created an adventure based on the fragmentations in her life in her landscape paintings. According to him, the artist should not paint nature as it is, but as he feels it. His intense use of blue in his paintings expresses his search for a static, peaceful and free life. He simplifies and interprets nature, his own feelings and thoughts, and creates a whole from its parts. The fragmentations with sharp boundaries reflect the boundaries that also exist in his real life. He sees nature as a free area. He creates by thinking that landscape is good for the human soul. He conceptualized loneliness while painting his tree paintings. The fragmentations in his landscape paintings emerged from the idea that the destructions he experiences integrate with the painting and create him. Is a person lonely only when he is alone, or is he lonely in crowds as well? In his series called ‘‘Chaos of Cities’’, he painted a pile of houses and expressed the crowd and feeling of being squeezed inside in his paintings. Houses with many pieces are piled up and side by side, but they are all separated from each other by pieces. By expressing the scarcity of landscape frames with trees around them, he accepted the environment he was in and reflected it on his canvases. Thinking that the feeling of being squeezed inside him is actually related to the environments he is in, he always paints distant places. There are many lives in the chaos of the city, and it is because he tries to see the beauty even in this chaos that he chooses his canvases as his subject. He usually paints with distant frames because he believes that happiness is always found far away. In his Chaos of Cities series, he has produced some of his paintings by dividing the canvas into vertical stripes and using black and white contrasts. Some of the canvas is fragmented and some are painted as seen, the aim here is to emphasize that there is still hope amidst the congestion of cities.Keçeli expresses his painting of distant places with Charles Baudelaire’s poem “No Matter Wherever It May Be, Even If It Be Beyond the World”:“This life is a hospital, every patient is stuck with the desire to change beds. Some want to suffer in front of the stove, some believe they will get better by the window. It always seems to me that I will be comfortable where I am not, this migration problem is a problem that I constantly discuss with my soul.”
Keçeli tries to make visible the transformation of urban culture within the lived reality and the chaos experienced by the individual during this interaction. It reflects the destruction of nature as the desire to see it using many shades of green. The alienation and discomfort felt by the person who has to experience urban culture, the spatial chaos that emerges as an extension of this society to which he is hesitant to belong, is revealed. It has a critical approach to the images of spatial chaos changed by the crowded, distorted urban culture. The utopias we live in in environments of concretization, environmental problems, and separation from society offer the visual of our hopes and dreams. The erasure of the historical texture leads to cultural losses, loss of identity, and the weakening of social memory. This brings about a lack of belonging. The loss of the historical texture is a tragic event that affects the identity of a society. While the changing dynamics of the city emphasize the internal and external conflicts experienced by people, it also points to the importance of social memory and the necessity of preserving historical heritage.
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