Collector\'s Wish

BURAK DELİER

24 JANUARY 2012 - 28 JANUARY 2012

Burak Delier (the artist): Could you tell me exactly what you want me to do, Saruhan Bey?

Saruhan Doğan (the collector): I want you to paint a wall red. This work is about a story that my grandfather used to tell me when I was a child, a story that I memorised by listening to it over and over again, I found out about the name of the story when this work came up, in “Safahat”: it’s called “The Painter is Right”. It is from a poem by Mehmet Akif. The story is this: A nouveau riche wants a relatively large room of his newly built villa to be ornamented, as there is a fashion of sacred history. He searches for a painter for a long time, and then all of a sudden someone “appears”, right out of the blue -which is interesting- and says, “I’ll do it”. He sets out and paints the whole eighteen feet wall into red…