Light on the Rocks (Detail)
This website is designed to present the long-spanning artworks of Nafi Çil within a structure that is updated regularly. Complementing the extensive documentation of the Archive website, this platform offers a carefully curated selection of the artist’s works, which will be refreshed periodically. Conceived as a modern showcase that offers new discoveries, the site invites you to look more closely into Nafi Çil’s world and to view his paintings through the distinct dialogues they establish with one another.
"I was a painter before I became an architect."
This sentence captures not only Nafi Çil’s professional identity but also his entire orientation toward artistic creation. Born in 1939 in Kula and devoting his life to making art in İzmir, Çil carries within him the precision of architecture and the intuition of painting. For Çil, painting is not merely a mode of expression, but a patiently inscribed condition of being.
Starting from the 1970s and extending to the present, Nafi Çil’s artistic journey is too expansive to be contained within the walls of his studio. While more than a hundred of his works are held in institutional and private collections, many others of various sizes remain in the artist’s studio today. Each of these works is like a living entity - initiated at a specific moment, sometimes returned to years later, and continually evolving alongside the artist’s life.
The boldness of his approach to color, form, and the themes he engages, as well as the transitions he forges between the figurative and the abstract, define the character of Nafi Çil’s paintings. The depth created through layered surfaces, his experimental use of materials, and the densities that gather across the work reveal themselves increasingly as the viewer approaches the work.
Nafi Çil views his paintings not as “art objects,” but as living beings he leaves to the world.
In the Forest of Memory (2008) is one of the mature examples of Nafi Çil’s abstract expression, developed through layers of line, color, and space. With the rhythmic repetition of its vertical lines, the work evokes both the texture of a forest and the fragmented structure of memory.
In this painting, Çil does not present a figure or a landscape directly; instead, he constructs the abstract space of memory itself. The work guides the viewer not toward the external world but toward an inner realm—the forest perceived here is not an actual landscape but the texture of one’s own recollection.
In the Forest of Memory offers a layered structure in which Çil’s sense of rhythm rooted in architecture meets the emotional depth of his painting.
In the Forest of Memory, 2008
Oil on Paper (Mounted on Marine Plywood)
49,2 x 58,7 cm
(with mat and solid wood frame: 68,5 x 77,5 cm)
In the Forest of Memory
2008
Nafi Çil’s Layered Painting Language
A personal aesthetic shaped by the dialogue between material, surface, texture, and the marks carved upon them.
In his practice, Nafi Çil brings together techniques such as applying oil paint on paper or, at times, directly on plywood; scraping the surface, and absorbing paint with newspaper, creating a visual language that resonates with the organic world of the earth. For Çil, materials are not merely carriers of his aesthetic language but active elements intrinsic to the life of the painting.
