How one is meant to return is wholly washed or dipped in a revivifying and informing water,

something which impresses upon our flesh the odor of the sacred. Each woman has potential access

to […] this river beneath the river.

Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“The river-beneath-the river” is a world in which aspects of human nature and vulnerability are

revealed layer by layer. In this world, where each painting can be read as a catalyst of meaning, Fulya Çetin calls the audience to get in this river and take a journey of their own. In this way, each person can dive into layers of meaning and discover a unique path by following his or her own intuition.

This exhibition, featuring mostly oil-on-canvas paintings and drawings Çetin has created over the last couple of years, promises to reveal further meanings when the viewer delves deeper into this World beneath the river. This is why the most striking common feature of the works here is that they relate to each other, somehow through their contradictory or conflicting meanings and open the layers. By portraying a moment containing movement like a frozen digital image, Çetin combines the aesthetics of the digital image with painting and makes us question the new meanings that emerge from this combination.

This movement, based on distance, contact and lack of contact between the figures, takes the shape of obvious but calm conflict in other paintings. The works in which Çetin depicts naked human bodies in contact with wild animals, when read in relation with the other paintings, show themselves not as an alternative to humanity’s already lost connection to nature, but as a warning against becoming inured to this separation.

Taking shape primarily around the themes of vulnerability, conflict, and lack of contact, the deep

bonds between these paintings and the intertwining meanings they express can take anyone to his or her own river-world. That is why these paintings connecting to each other in zigzags, parallels, and crosses, invite the audience to realize their own weaknesses and lack of connection and to bathe fully in this “river-beneath-the river”.