In the Dust of the Ideal

By Lisa Knoll

8/5/2023

Exhibition Details:
4 May - 10 June 2023
Contours Withdrawn from Marble

Atticus Art Gallery (11a Queen Street, BA1 1HE, Bath)

Image © Atticus Art Gallery

In Contours Withdrawn from Marble, presented at Atticus Art Gallery in Bath from 4 May to 10 June 2023, Batuhan Yardımcı dismantles the fantasy of the ideal classical body with a series of paintings that operate not as depictions but as acts of subtraction. These are not representations of ruins. They are painterly excavations of form’s erosion, insistently withdrawing from the recognisable, the heroic, and the intact. Executed in oil on canvas, Yardımcı’s compositions confront the enduring ideological weight of Greco-Roman statuary—not to venerate, but to unmake.

Organised by Atticus Art Gallery and curated by Sasha Burkhanova-Khabadze, the exhibition unfolds as a deliberate reimagining of classical aesthetics through a contemporary, critical lens. Their curatorial vision complements Yardımcı’s formal strategies, fostering a space where the inherited visual codes of antiquity are neither celebrated nor dismissed, but dissected—slowly, surgically, and with a defiant sensitivity.

Across the gallery’s hushed space (11a Queen Street, BA1 1HE, Bath), architectural fragments, anatomical protrusions, and spectral silhouettes emerge from dense black grounds—not as symbols of continuity, but as interruptions in historical time. The paintings stage what might be called a non-ideal classical sensorium: a space where the senses engage not with wholeness but with fracture, with absence, with unfinish. Figures arrive dismembered, heads half-rendered, torsos liquefying at the edges. As such, Yardımcı’s project destabilises the visual regime of the classical, severing its ideological moorings in permanence, masculinity, and state-form.

The works are saturated not only with oil but with a deliberate latency of meaning. Compositionally, they hover between emergence and disappearance—classical forms caught mid-unbecoming. This is not decay, nor is it mourning. It is a formal method rooted in opacity, a refusal to consolidate the image into legibility. The voids—thick, luminous, almost mineral in texture—consume the positive space of the figure. What is legible is always on the verge of collapse.

Drawing on his diasporic formation—Turkish-born, UK-based—Yardımcı addresses the contested afterlife of classical forms within the cultural geography of contemporary Turkey. In several paintings, the viewer encounters peripheral fragments of Hellenistic sculpture: half-erased volutes, collapsed amphorae, the trace of a temple wall. Yet these are not recuperated for national pride or civilisational narrative. Instead, Yardımcı advances a queer archaeology of disarticulation, where the classical functions less as origin than as residue—a fractured archive mediated through postcolonial entanglements, orientalist projection, and institutional neglect.

What is also at stake is the gendered life of the ruin. If classical statuary has long functioned as a masculinist code of bodily perfection and cultural power, then Yardımcı’s soft undoing of its surfaces enacts a counter-gesture—a dissolution of ideality itself. Anatomical parts are neither celebrated nor eroticised; they are cast adrift in a visual field that resists containment. In this regard, the paintings resonate with feminist critiques of form—Griselda Pollock’s dislocations of visual mastery, or Elizabeth Grosz’s conception of architecture and the body as mutual inscriptions in time.

Light plays a tactical role. Rather than modelling volume, it fractures it. In several canvases, one glimpses marble under duress: lit as if by archaeological torchlight, shimmering against overwhelming black. This is not the light of rational classicism but the oblique, erratic light of unearthing—what remains when monumentality has broken down into image, when image has broken down into trace.

What Contours Withdrawn from Marble ultimately proposes is a temporal shift. These are not paintings about the past, but about the afterlives of forms—about how imperial aesthetics persist in cultural memory, and how they might be wrested from their fixed meanings. By refusing restoration or nostalgia, Yardımcı offers the classical not as continuity, but as fissure. In doing so, he invites a mode of looking attuned to what escapes the chisel: the fragment, the void, the gesture that hesitates.

These works do not conclude. They remain, flickering at the edge of recognisability, asking what kind of body—what kind of form—can still speak from the ruins.

For further information, images, or press enquiries, please contact:
info@atticusgallery.co.uk
or visit www.atticusgallery.co.uk