Burak Ata Carsick Sports Club

In Carsick Sports Club, Ata involves the main elements of his painting in a new and more solid way. Having studied and done painting from a very early age on, Ata has come to stick to a series of elements that translated his imaginary onto canvas. Putting himself as 'a researcher that looks for things by the very act of painting,' Ata offered a significant quality of permanence in terms of the subjects of his interest, his artistic approach and his technique of narration. Considering the ubiquitous commotion in the past decade and the personal turmoils of growing up as an artist, Ata's attachment to his own pictorial repertoire proves to be uniquely substantial.

During the past years that were defined by series of uncertainties, Ata managed to sustain his artistic existence within a certain personal painterly language against and despite the inherent injustice of societal institutions and the social life itself. His consistency was enabled by two thematic anchors he has solidly hold on to: the records of his autobiographic transformations and the schools of painting in Early Renaissance. Ata points out the thematic framework of his paintings as such: 'In my works, we usually see some figures that melt into spatial network, that are crushed by or pushed to the background by the heaviness of the space. This figure bears an implication to auto- portraiture, yet it also points to the idea of an artist in general. Architectural components, or any element that serve to the feeling of the space represent the structural, the informational and the cultural. Various interpretations of the painting in Early Renaissance, that I have always referred back to whenever I looked for answers of any kind, have thus come to play the central role in my works.'

The way Ata organizes his thematic pictorial components and applies them to contemporary life in Istanbul, involves his paintings particularly authentic. He positions himself at a permeable point in an unpretentious manner and thus records and transmits the tides of his personal and the quotidian. On top of it, thanks to his kind treatment of Early Renaissance painting, he carries in an eclectic humor and a subtle criticism, that would not be revealed in any other way than the implementation of Early Renaissance style that was developed before and outside of the 'academic' and 'monotonous' understanding of modern 'perspective.' The absurd quality in Ata's works, that could only be put by painterly expression, involves a genuine record for the rave and exuberance overall in 2000s. In

Carsick Sports Club, the bildungsstory of a young intellectual who was defined by artistic enthusiasm is being told in a quintessential way within both a dark and colorful interpretation.