These are no gardens; these are dense, impenetrable, demanding terrains. And they are menacing. Nature is no longer confined to silence or submission: it approaches, encircles, and exerts pressure. What once appeared soft now carries force. The illusion of control begins to dissolve; nature no longer remains silent, nor does it yield.
With this exhibition, I wanted to reiterate my message more forcefully, as if within an echo chamber.
— Canan Tolon
Dirimart is pleased to announce Refrain, Canan Tolon’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. Bringing together twelve recent large-scale abstract paintings, hung consecutively in a sequence that echoes through the space with a hollow insistence, the exhibition traces the imprint of an encirclement dominated by organic force and cyclical time, where the suppressed voices of nature refuse to let the viewer go.
Canan Tolon’s artistic practice, shaped around the notions of chance and accident, also engages with concepts of nature, time, memory, and architecture. Her process of pouring, erasing, and scraping paint into layered surfaces becomes almost the very subject of the work. Containing construction and destruction at once, her works embody the tension between existence and disappearance. Translating the dialogue between architectural thought and the interplay of built form and nature onto the canvas, Tolon’s layered surfaces oscillate between abstraction and representation, establishing a language that is at once structural and intuitive.
The twelve abstract compositions presented in Refrain embody a revolt against the impossibility of painting in silence. Conceived as an immersive landscape experience, they offer a sense of visual continuity and atmosphere. With their floral forms and soft colours, the paintings first appear to suggest a familiar silence, yet in their arrangement – where space itself becomes the bearer of the refrain – they provoke unease. Installed on a curved wall that envelops the viewer and abolishes all distance, the works deny any panoramic view or possibility of escape. The gaze wanders between them only to return, inevitably, to the same forms, the same silence, the same pressure – never able to grasp the whole.
Each canvas functions like a refrain – not only in imagery but in structure. Monumental in scale, identical in proportion, and hung edge to edge without interruption, the repetition they generate is neither decorative nor passive; it encircles, it insists. Like slogans memorised and repeated until emptied of meaning, these works resonate with a hollow persistence. Seen up close, their faded surfaces carry traces of decay and a quiet threat. Their repetitive structure suggests not linear time but cyclical recurrence, transforming into the refrain of both visual and existential confinement, into the ceaseless yet ineffective song of a word without a voice.
The works in Refrain question humanity’s desire to dominate nature and its disorientation within the very systems it creates. Returning with a silence too heavy to be ignored, they reveal what has been repressed. In Refrain, nature no longer appears as a silent backdrop but as a sequence of cycles – like the endlessly repeating frames of a film strip – resounding as the echo of a suppressed voice.
Canan Tolon’s exhibition Refrain will be on view at Dirimart Pera, 6–28 September 2025.
Location: Dirimart Pera
