In the studio, objects pile up—newspaper clippings, postcards, half-finished images… Each one detached from its own time, yet continuing to exist on the same surface. A forgotten street in one corner, a scene drifting through the mind in another; painting here is constructed less through certainty than through ambiguity. We come together with Antonio to talk about this continuous state of making that stretches from childhood to today; the countercultural impulses carried from Hafriyat to the present; his way of thinking that moves between writing and painting; and his relationship with objects. As we move through images, stories, and fragmented memories, nothing ever fully resolves. Everything remains slightly unfinished, unstable, on the verge of disappearing. And perhaps this entire practice is less about producing meaning than about establishing a fleeting contact with existence itself.
How did your relationship with painting begin, and where has it evolved today?
Painting—engaging with things—has been part of my existence for as long as I can remember. When I begin to act, what triggers it is a kind of confusion, but everything starts within a chain of events tied to a place: we wake up into a place and an event. A person exists helplessly within events, inside a place. We’re talking about the very thing that produces time. Naturally, there are many impulses that set a person into motion—these “influences” become a starting point, and then action follows.
When I say “as long as I can remember,” I mean that everything around me, everything that entered my field of interest, appeared miraculous. Existence itself is a miracle, and everything else seems that way to me as well. I perceive everything— the past is part of it, the present is part of it. To remain within the moment itself, moving through a flow without purpose, sensing oneself, objects, and events from the center of a gaze.
Painting, engaging with objects, has a kind of uselessness—and that’s what makes it interesting. It’s a virtual field. I think it suits my existence. Over time, I found people who feel themselves within this same field.
Your collective practice with the Hafriyat Group created a subcultural language and street aesthetic that is still present in your work today. What has been the most defining impulse you’ve carried from that period?
During my school years and afterward, I found a space with artists who allowed me to discuss these ideas freely. I spent time with them—they were all painters I admired and found sincere. It felt as though we came from a shared emotional world, and what defined them most was their approach to counterculture. A group formed almost spontaneously, thinking about the nature of opposition and alternative culture.
We developed habits like painting things that weren’t meant to be painted. And we had a lot of fun—because the established norms were offering stale ideas, and they were very boring. Hafriyat was built on these feelings and became a kind of school for us. We had a sharp, clear sense of what we needed to do. Almost every day, we were discovering and creating something new.
Is the effort to produce meaning truly an act of creation, or an inevitable illusion constructed to mask human helplessness in the face of existence?
I felt like I was desperately bringing everything around me into existence. Isn’t that the great helplessness of being human—producing meanings for things that have none? The concept itself has always seemed desperate to me. I’ve always felt myself as an action unfolding over time. There’s even something humorous about it, perhaps. I’m still in a similar state.
I exaggerate that idea of the miraculous space I mentioned earlier. In fact, I’m not even sure whether I truly exist within a space. I’d say there’s a natural relationship between what we call my nature, my interests, and my methods—for now. Inconsistency, chaos, uncertainty, incompleteness—a romance, a melodrama—everything is spinning around me, but the dominant feeling is helplessness.
Sometimes it’s the forgotten corners of films, sometimes the indistinct, forgettable points of a place. All of it orbits within my mind. And perhaps we call the totality of this “life.”
Since 2015, your works have been accompanied by journals and stories, almost turning them into a literary universe. Is writing a space for thinking for you, or an independent layer that shapes your production?
I found myself writing, and my texts began accompanying my exhibitions because I find explanatory texts about artworks dry and absurd. “The artist used red here, is trying to say this there…” I think artworks should have meanings independent of such explanations. These kinds of texts tend to block meaning; they’re often boring and feel like they exist just because something needed to be written.
What I write is nothing more than talking to myself—functionless. It’s like trying to pour something unsaid, unspoken into paragraphs. I don’t have the ability to organize my exhibitions around a conceptual framework, so these scattered texts feel more refreshing to me. They don’t form a cohesive whole. They’re like a feeling of rain, fragments of memory flashing like sparks in the mind—shifting, breaking apart.
They don’t have to be consistent. They don’t have to build anything. They simply exist—like a corner of a film, a street, a novel. And they will disappear.
Your work Kasap Cemal, shown in the Wide Expanse exhibition, creates a scene that stands between personal memory and collective memory. What feeling most influenced this work: loss, longing, anger, disappearance, or the desire to preserve something?
One night, stacks of paper left over from a butcher shop in my neighborhood—one that had closed—ended up at my home. They sat in a corner for a long time, maybe something would be drawn on them. Then at some point, I thought of painting them one-to-one, and I did. I brought it to a fair.
At fairs, people usually look at each other’s work, exchange a few words—even if it’s just out of politeness. The piece sat there for hours; no one said anything. Then I was alone with my gallerist, and he asked, “Where’s the work? Aren’t you going to open the package?”
It was one of the rare moments I enjoyed. I said, “This is the work—there’s no package to open.” I had painted Kasap Cemal in oil, about two by two and a half meters. It could have been Kasap Enver, or Kasap Talat—it was just butcher paper. Why I painted it is always a riddle.
Op Raif Bey Street is the street where my mother lived for years; part of my youth passed there.
Your relationship with objects considered “worthless,” discarded, or forgotten can also be read as an archival practice. Are you a collector rescuing these objects, or a storyteller creating new narratives with them?
I don’t really know what it means. Depending on the questions we ask, I tend to focus on meanings afterward, not as a prior intention. “Oh yes,” I say, “this must have meant something to you”—even if it was thrown away, even if it just had a name on it.
A poor object—wrapped around something, passed from hand to hand, arriving at my home on Op Raif Bey Street, then painted, exhibited… everything points to a sequence of actions, to time. Time passes beside me in fragments—or maybe I pass through it, I don’t know.
The corners of cities ripple quietly like waves of the sea, like trees swaying in the wind. These corners wait silently for the “events” that will make them meaningful. The sun burns the streets; people walk across them, raising and setting suns. They’re not like Google Maps—once you look at them, they come alive in your mind.
For years, in my old studio, there was Cebel Topu Street—I painted a section of a parking lot from there. I was bored while painting it, so I rendered it somewhat realistically. That painting stands in a corner, just like that street I’ve passed hundreds of times.
Trains, boats, islands, beaches, and street scenes appear frequently in your work. What do these images represent in your personal map? Belonging somewhere, moving away, or always being in transit?
In my exhibition JPEG Archipelago, I designed a speedboat for the protagonist of my story—its name was Aura, and the hero’s dream was to reach the city of Aura within the JPEG archipelago. In Mom, I’m Going to Pour Concrete, my train moved through time and images alongside a poem. The ship Stelianos Hrisopulos promised an incredible sea journey in Escape from Marmara. My spaceship Atılgan was mentioned in a story set two billion years in the future. Another ship, Syrian Star, was accompanied by a story called Smell of Diesel.
I don’t know what it is about these vehicles. In Cigarettes, Whiskey Crates, My Ferrari Lover in the Seas, my car was a sports car passing unknown seas where Masist Gül and Haygaz were talking. I don’t know what I fit into the cities I design with these objects and vehicles.
There’s something magical about travel, but I’m also a studio-based artist. To enter the microcosm of the place I’m in, I photographed Istanbul’s corners for 30 years and published them as Istanbul Atlas. I’ve loved looking at atlases since childhood. Then Google Earth came along, and I wandered endlessly.
The beauty of looking at an atlas is rediscovering a place that was always right next to you but escaped your attention. I walk the same route every day, yet suddenly I notice something—a fishing village behind Sanayi Mahallesi, boats tied up, laundry hanging, houses along the shore. And I ask myself: “I pass here every day—how did I never notice this paradise?”
I think painting, working with objects, carries that same feeling: a place I know, yet as distant as a hidden dream. My vehicles are always ready—I can discover it at any moment.
What role does your studio play in your production process? Is it an archive, a playground, or a narrative space where stories take shape?
My studio feels like the control tower of this process of discovery. All my songs take shape there; they slowly come alive over hours. It’s a place where I work with hope, without knowing what will emerge.
It’s where I’m alone, where I cook, my hut, my home. It’s where I get bored, where I watch films. Painting, like writing, is something inward for me—there’s nothing but inner voices as everything forms. It’s where I look at books, read, where my students join me on certain days.
It’s filled with objects, postcards, plastic items—a kind of treasure chest. Newspaper clippings, egg cartons—it feels like a harbor or marketplace, but everything inside is my own selection. It’s the place I miss when I travel to distant islands.
When starting a work, is your first move usually writing, drawing, or engaging with an object? How does the tension between “construction and destruction” manifest in your studio?
Works don’t come into being all at once. I find myself constantly thinking through an image problem. I can describe it like this: I have fragments of images in my mind. While sketching in an empty notebook, something suddenly flashes. This sudden emergence is important to me.
Slowly, I pull that image out of emptiness—or perhaps it always exists as a kind of emptiness. Sometimes a painting emerges from another painting. I’m also dealing with issues like repetition, incompleteness, and many other painterly problems.
In the end, there’s both constructing and dismantling a structure—these concepts, along with many other components. How the surface develops is an unknown territory. Sometimes I follow a clipping, sometimes a photograph.
What emerges should be meaningful, but also useless. Repetition is necessary to maintain a certain tension—not dull repetition, but creative, generative repetition.
Does artistic production and viewing create lasting meaning, or is it a collective “family” experience that shares only a temporary sense of existence?
The act of painting reminds me that I’m part of a large family—the family of painting, and indirectly, the family of art. For thousands, even tens of thousands of years, things have been made—sometimes from an inner, innocent desire, sometimes as part of a collective function or assignment, always as part of culture.
In the modern world, it’s a vast system shaped by hidden patrons, where the autonomy of the artist is constantly at stake. Museums, schools, courses, galleries, states, collectors—they are all actors in this world. Like a family of doctors or engineers, everyone has a place within it.
Viewers are also part of this system. By engaging with artworks—in museums, galleries, fairs, or homes—they sustain artists. I think what gives power to the artist is the consensus of viewers and all these actors.
At the same time, the image itself has the power to reassert itself over these cognitive processes. Everything circulates in this orbit, offered to those who are curious.
No matter what is understood, time eventually reduces everything—compressing centuries into packages. Today, we know only fragments from the third century. Ten thousand years from now, nothing will remain from this century’s films or paintings.
What matters is remembering that, whatever our reasons, we are part of a process that will disappear. Perhaps all these actions are attempts to say, hopelessly, “I existed.” Like the personal photographs we accumulate—they too will vanish.
I don’t know if there is anything more valuable than time well spent. For both the viewer and the maker, this entire field offers a sensory, spiritual space—an experience of transmission. Beyond that, I don’t believe in anything more. Like everything that is transmitted, it moves toward uncertainty, toward darkness.