Beneath The Surface

The works featured in this exhibition share a common element: sand and the natural impressions created by its adherence to the canvas. Transforming sand into a surface texture, Zeynep Erdinç explores the duality of fullness and emptiness through the density and sparsity of the surface. She seeks traces of humanity—lost within the marks of rain, wind, and decay—within these natural patterns. Erdinç’s paintings compel us to gaze upon a pictorial surface where humanity seems absent, moving beyond the mere arbitrariness implied by their status as exhibition objects.

In these works, dominated by a monochromatic palette, the visible textures, lines, and forms are neither symbolic nor figurative, as they do not signify any familiar meaning. Instead, Zeynep Erdinç communicates through the language of nature. We see, yet we do not know. To know, Erdinç directs us beneath the surface—leading us to recognize that this surface reflects the viewer’s own depth. Her compositions, built from ambiguous forms and textures, pull us backward into our spiral of understanding, within the framework of human time, and back to our primal state—where we were one with nature itself.