Serdar Acar creates enigmatic landscape paintings, often occupied by a solitary figure, symbolising the feelings of loss, anxiety and desire he experienced during pandemic isolation. The landscapes, characterised by their great plains and vast openness, are rendered in subdued, pastel colours. The artist calls the scenes “symbols of the uncanny”, referencing their dreamlike, almost futuristic and otherworldly nature. The figures often stand at the foothills of Acar’s pink and blue mountains or at the edge of a lake, as if on the precipice of a dream or the border that separates fiction and reality. Apart from these figures, the only other living organisms in Acar’s mise-en-scène are trees. In ‘Equivalent’, one of the artist’s series of works, he uses the cypress tree – in some cultures, the representation of life and strength, and in others, an image of death – to display the paradox of human existence; living life in the persistent shadow of death. ...
