Artist Statement

The Seen and the Seeing brings together a series of paintings that sit at the edge of recognition. These are not conventional portraits, but emotional apparitions; figures caught between presence and disappearance, like a memory half-returned.

Though the materials are traditional, the works are created through a process developed over the course of seven years and  through a unique process that fuses pigment into the fabric of the canvas, each painting is an illusion, a visual language that mimics the texture and detachment of printed matter: smooth, diffused, strangely precise.

The works challenge our vision, now altered to accommodate a world dominated and mediated by screens. We increasingly experience faces and bodies flattened into glowing rectangles, pixelated, endlessly consumed. Source material for studio portraiture is no longer a living model, but photographs, digital images, projections. These paintings echo that shift—not to critique it, but to hold it up, to dwell inside it, to ask what it does to intimacy, memory, and the act of seeing, itself.

Artist Biography

Hilmi Baskurt earned a double degree in fine art painting, print making and art history and theory from the University of East London.  Hilmi is a post graduate of the Royal Academy of Arts and has been a practicing artist over 30 years as well as being an art teacher over 20 years.