The C.A.M. Gallery starts the year 2021 with an exhibition entitled “Yelıng” by Mahmut Celayir. For this exhibition, the artist was inspired by a healing plant called Yelıng growing on high mountains and acknowledged as the forerunner of spring.

“As a nature explorer with new perceptions and experiences, soil and plant formations remain the main resource of my work.  Intimately witnessing the earth leads us to reconsider our roots and the source of life. The world’s organic, rich, charming, and instructive motions constitute a supply that I cannot remain indifferent to as an artist.

In my recent work, I have concentrated on a plant called Yelıng in Zazaki*. Growing aloft, this plant appears as the signal of the springtime to come, when the snow starts to melt. With its high nutritious value, the Yelıng replaces the winter provisions which run out at the beginning of spring; women harvest Yelıng singing folksongs. This ritual has a special place in my childhood memories. Afterward, during the summer days, the sunlight changes the plant in different and flowing ways. This dynamic and spontaneous vivacity offers an abstract abundance of textures and forms relevant to the language of painting.

Inspired by local material sprouted on summits and keeping our lives company, I wanted to reach out a genesis of universe cosmic and organic, with a close perspective. Hereby what is determinant is, nature’s, consequently life’s laminated dynamism which gives us hope with its renewing and healing qualities. Life goes on…

* The language that is spoken by the Zaza people of eastern Anatolia.