Yasemin Cengiz Cagatay is interested in painting the unknown. While painting portals into alien worlds, dream landscapes and new realities, she devises complex stories about the nature of being. There is never just one reading of her art, and her work suggests ambiguity and ambivalence; she seeks new possibilities endlessly.In her paintings, the familiar and the visionary are inextricably interwoven, creating new associations. Her paintings open up windows onto a universe in which narratives are reimagined; leading the viewers onto another plane of consciousness.Oscillating between representation and abstraction, her dream-like imagery is frozen in time.

Producing works of great internal complexity, she aims at creating an artificial reality.Her figures hang in the air somewhere between free-fall and surreal suspension.The occupants of her paintings are the stuff of dreams: Cosmologies, birds of paradise, butterflies, sharks, hybrid creatures, mother nature. Aiming at ambivalence, she creates complex allegories set beyond reality. Fusing an array of vibrantly painted flora and fauna, she creates an ecosystem inhabited by hybrid creatures. In a visual interplay of the familiar and the unknown, she imagines macrocosmic depths of the universe.

In her heavily surrealistic compositions standing somewhere in between the abstract and the figurative, the intense movement targeting the viewer’s subconsciousness is highly pronounced. The use of color that carries the traces of old master painters in “curvaceous' and “fluent” forms has an important role in Cagatay’s artistic language. Her body of work is reminiscent of the chaotic world the contemporary human being lives in and the inner turmoil it creates, while it offers windows opening into other worlds where escape is possible.

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