Leyla Yenirce, 'Amplifier'
Leyla Yenirce’s new paintings bring together brushwork and printmaking in a dialogue that is by turns confrontational, tender, abrasive and lyrical. Her jagged, scrawled, propulsive mark-making at times obscures or mutes the imagery silkscreened onto each canvas. At others, these gestures act by contrast as a kind of emphasis, accumulating pictorial energies around a given image. Amplifying them. And it so happens that sound – especially the sound of a human female voice, speaking or singing – is a guiding metaphor for their production. They seem to meditate on the implications of what the poet Anne Carson, in her 1992 book The Gender of Sound, called “putting a door on the female mouth.” For Carson, the female voice in classical Greek literature is associated with “shrieking, wailing, sobbing…[and] eruptions of raw emotion”: sounds that disrupt the controlled and moderate tone of male authority figures. In Yenirce’s work, the door is kicked open. These are noisy, eruptive paintings.
The starting point for these works was Charlotte Salomon’s illustrated book, or graphic novel, Life? Or Theatre?, made from 1940-42 but first published in 1963, twenty years after her murder in a gas chamber in Auschwitz. In the book, the protagonist (a thinly veiled self-portrait) is encouraged by her music teacher to sing as a means of self-expression. The result is the book itself, which the narrator refers to as “the song of farewell to [my] native land.” For Yenirce, Salomon is one of a pantheon of female influences whose faces appear in these works in the form of silkscreened images that occasionally glitch and repeat, like an off-kilter rhythm. Others include the Italian author and antifascist Natalia Ginzburg, the American r&b singer Aaliyah, and Yenirce’s German teacher Christiane Haselier, a kind of stand-in for Salomon’s inspirational music teacher.
Most pertinent are the figures associated with the rights of Kurdish people, including the folk musician and activist Helin Bölek, the singer, artist and advocate for Kurdish culture Hozan Mizgîn, and the activist and politician Leyla Zana, after whom the artist was named. These paintings coalesce around the figure of Zana, who repeatedly appears in alternately legible and spectral forms. During her speech when joining the Turkish parliament in 1991 as its first Kurdish woman member, Zana provocatively spoke a single sentence in Kurdish; it was at that point illegal to use the language in public. Zana’s action and Yenirce’s allusions to it in her work provides a contextual weave for the sonic dimension of these paintings. The making of sound is reimagined as a means of occupying space, of staking a new territory for political gestures.
Yenirce’s background in music – in particular, the noise music scene – has occasionally interjected in a literal way with installations of her paintings. Here, sound is implied, but the harsh discordancy of noise music, as well as the haphazard sampling of her printed faces, invites allusions to abrasive tendencies in modern musicianship. Under the instruction of her tutor Jutta Koether – herself both painter and musician – Yenirce developed a painterly language steeped in late modernist mastery of touch. And while her paintings, in their tactile translation of existing imagery, resemble the ragged Pop of Robert Rauschenberg, the lushness and immediacy of her array of marks is closer in spirit to Joan Mitchell, and channels that artist’s woozy romanticism. Yenirce finds a way to make that antique language new. The result is a practice that emerges from a deep and tender engagement with how a person might operate in a broken world, with – in the artist’s own words – “painting as a surface for everything that goes through my body.”
Dr Ben Street