‘Alternative’ is an exhibition serves as coming to terms in a semantic sense of Lolita Asil’s discovery of combination of art and science that has been going on for over ten years. Asil, transforming the goal to investigate the functioning of a human body into an artistic tool, traces the existence in an extraordinary aesthetic perception.

Every experienced waking moment during the process starting with the first breath taken at the birth, to the coldness of death bears the attestation of improbability that leaves no room to chance. When the flawless cycle of existence is taken into consideration, it is possible to observe the connection between the nature of human body and the endless possibilities of universe in both conceptual and functional means. Artist’s effort to resolve the uncanny mechanism enshrouded by the permeability of the skin, which is the closest to human, brings her closer to the discovery, of an order opening to the infinitude that she forms a copy of a body in a smaller scale.

The process starting with the artistic analysis of the smallest units of a body directed Lolita Asil to an experience from detail to surface, and then to the multitude of one. Drawing the roadmap of a reversed journey, starting from the surface of skin, passing through the muscle, bone, and nerve tissues, arriving to the cell, is also creating the pictorial projection of scientific research of existence. In the end, the collective effort of science and art to reach the truth comes together at the infiniteness of the imagination and creation. On the other hand, the superficiality of reference to Lolita Asil as a painter of cadavers bears the awareness of the intertwining of existence and the consciousness of death, deep inside this undertaken role.

The pictorial language of Asil relies on the style that is reflecting the refined tones that push the limits of the color perception of the eye; it also provides a formal integrity. Artist’s choice of seven colors, yellow, orange, red, green, blue, lavender and purple, is the representation of a touch to the resonance of existence with an artistic expression, in the light of science. Universal Colors (2001) which is central to the conceptual idea of ‘Alternative’, is the expression of the unity of descending longitudes and latitudes from left to right on a ten square meter surface in a representative manner. This array that starts from yellow and ends in purple drifts into an endless cycle in the radiance of white finds the clues of emphasis on the life that shifts with the reality of death within the triangle of human, earth and universe.

The unity of seven colors, the array that ranges from yellow to purple, its transformation to a gyre that flows into eternity with the participation of white, and finally the representation of line as a form and its semantic value form the basic elements of Lolita Asil’s art, in regard to its style. In this regard, artist’s works, Tree of Life and New Human Design, are created as the two-dimensionality of canvas turns into three-dimensional forms that develops in parallel with an experience that reaches the skin at the surface from the smallest particle within the body.  Now, the issue is the face, the most pronounced part of the whole that the mind hosts, and that is placed on top of the hierarchy. The human face, with its quality of being the sole source of all senses except the tactile sense, is the only physical area that shows the expressions which are reflections of emotions and thoughts. The artistic representation of the position of human head on the body corresponds with, on the one hand, aggrandizing of rationality, and on the other hand, the unity of emotions and senses with the body and mind in existence.

The cross sections of faces in artist’s Tree of Life (2) installation points at the perfect common mechanism that the human owns under the skin, while ignoring the diversity in character and personality design. Resembling to a family tree, a total of one hundred and forty four human faces, formed in seven different sizes, placed side by side and one under the other, also convey a case of expressionless and supports the perception where one turns into multitude. While the chromatic distribution of life force in human body penetrates into the exhibition, the harmony between the lines that unifies with the face form by a horizontal and vertical application proves to be the mathematical projection of permeability of the skin and the infinitude of the universe.

The exhibition, ‘Alternative’, documents the analysis of the harmony of human body and universe on an artistic plane of existence, maybe with its progress from its start to present, and shares the last achieved phase of this experience with the viewer. The work named The Bridge, in accordance with the communication built by the human body with its mass in this world and its environment; it emphasizes the togetherness of the narrative of new human and an architectural structure. The Bridge, with its symbolic function of connecting the one at the end with the other, presents the effort to reach a new model of human that have acquired the awareness of the bond between art and science, and also the extraordinary unity of human body and the universe.

Ultimately, just like the Western rationalism and Cartesian philosophy that is based on the distinction between the mind and body, and the Eastern thoughts that is supposed to be its alternative in a Occidental perception create a synthesis, the unity between Lolita Asil’s art and the sciences that investigates the reality of human body and universe can be seen. Despite the conceptual and technical quests of mechanics and electronics are able to find a place in Western understanding of art, a transcendent approach to the human body and its unity with the universe indicate a belonging to the world of alternatives. Whereas the perception of which is the alternative of which changes with the achieved level of awareness, it carries emulating the whole with it.

Ceren Turan

Istanbul, 2012