“Still Life With Lampshade” operates as a study of the mutually dependent relationship between abstraction and figuration in painting, as seen through the lens of contemporary visual technologies. The grey and white background pattern of Photoshop not only translates into a multi-layered figure, but also sets the color palette of the entire painting. Multiple fragments of canvas, stretchers, stretcher bars and other stand-ins for painting coexist in fragmented and layered pieces, describing operations of interruption, superimposition, collage and rearticulation made possible by the digital software, while the careful application of shadows suggests a physical reality where the light source is located on the right hand side, as opposed to the flat and uniform transparency of the computer screen.

Through a subtle painterly composition, Leyla Gediz conveys an unstable, strange and hybrid reality, at once physically materializing the software’s background and shattering the purity of painting by translating it into a data set manipulated through multiple digital operations. At first sight, “Still Life With Lampshade” seems to be an homage to the grid as the primal and primary form of spatial organization, the matrix underlying modernity repeated through the forms of the window, the canvas, the stretcher, the screen and the network; but the meticulous painterly operations of shading that distance the lamp from the surface and every other fragment from its background fully reinscribe it in the realm of mimesis.

The painting also attests to an ongoing investigation of space and installation in Gediz’ practice: when seen hanging on a wall in physical lighting conditions, the shades surrounding the canvas multiply this interplay and extend the painting’s conceptual echo into the exhibition space.