boxes of cigarettes and whisky all over the sea, ferâre my love

Zilberman Gallery is pleased to announce the rst exhibition of Antonio Cosentino with the gallery. The exhibition boxes of cigarettes and whisky all over the sea, ferâre, my love includes the artist’s most recent works and is on view between May 18 and July 2.

Antonio Cosentino is one of the 3 founders of the artist initiative Hafriyat, which was founded in 1996 and became highly in uential in Istanbul’s art scene in the 2000s. In Cosentino’s paintings, one nds a wealth of images distilled from everyday life, the depths of personal memory, and the visual culture of the artist’s city, which the artist uses in his photographs, paintings and sculptures. The artist continues this tradition through different materials in his exhibition at the gallery, creating an atlas of today’s Turkey.

Ferâre, a tin car that can be read as a continuation of the sculptures playing a central role in the artist’s practice, is at the core of this exhibition. Cosentino is in uenced by the ability of tin to be recycled and reused, an industrially nonconsumable material. He uses this material from design to production to portray humorously his process that is reminiscent of that of a craftsman who works alone. Through a tin car, he reveals the accepted relationship between waste and value from an ironically charged, novel perspective.

Just like the collective nature of our personal memory, the whole exhibition shows modes of remembering. Irony is replaced by heaviness in the portraits of Masist Gül where Gül’s facial expressions are full of terror. The reproductions of various portraits from Masist Gül’s hand-drawn comics from the 1980s are reminiscent of the trauma and violence that Masist, who was Armenian and was from Adana, used in his comics as a method of self-healing.
The series of paintings are re ections of the complicated projections of the environmental and urban architecture. The coldness of marble and its nothingness refer to psychological layers, while constructing an inventory of states of mind. Within this context, Masist’s over owing desperation, efforts; the car’s absurd warmth; the other works’ “shabbiness, nostalgia, shifting rhythm” (in the artist’s words) in the exhibition “boxes of cigarettes and whisky all over the sea, ferâre, my love” converge to produce an “intuitive perception” rather than a “lofty narrative.”

“boxes of cigarettes and whisky all over the sea, ferâre, my love” is on view between 18 May and 2 July 2016.

For further information, please contact Zeynep Temiz at zeynep@galerizilberman.com.

Antonio Cosentino graduated from the Department of Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts at Mimar Sinan University in 1994. He founded the art initiative Hafriyat with Hakan Gürsoytrak and Mustafa Pancar in 1996. His recent exhibitions include Istanbul, Passion, Joy, Fury (curators: Hou Hanru, Ceren Erdem, Elena Motisi and Donatella Saroli, MAXXI National 21st Century Arts Museum, Italy, 2015), Mom I’m Going Out to Pour Some Concrete (with Extrastruggle, Studio-X, Istanbul, 2015), Escape from Marmara Sea: The Stelyanos Hrisopulos (Salt Ulus, Ankara, 2015), Departure Marmara Sea (Bergsen & Bergsen, Istanbul, 2013) and Tin City (Külah, Istanbul, 2013). Having participated in numerous exhibitions both in Turkey and abroad, Cosentino contributed works to Spare Time, Great Work (Platform 3, Munich, 2011), and Tactics of Invisibility (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; Tanas, Berlin; ARTER, Istanbul, 2010-2011) with the collective Hafriyat. The artist lives and works in Istanbul.