Imperial High

The new exhibition presents a series of paintings and glass sculptures in which the artist’s distinctive visual world gradually breaks free from the two-dimensional surface. The motif ceases to function merely as representation and acquires a physical presence. Colour, lustre, transparency, relief and the material itself become equally significant elements of the work.

In his paintings, which combine oil and acrylic, Pasta Oner continues to explore fragments of collective visual memory. Luxury objects, cinematic imagery, car culture, comics, typography and seemingly banal consumer goods come together without regard for their original hierarchies. A watch may acquire the monumentality of a portrait, a lollipop the significance of an emblem, and a car the form of an almost archetypal symbol. The individual paintings do not construct a linear narrative; rather, they function as fragments of memory in which personal experience intertwines with images absorbed through film, advertising, design and popular culture.

One of the exhibition’s defining elements is the introduction of glass. Historically associated with craftsmanship, decoration and light, the medium is employed here in a way that is both monumental and paradoxically fragile. What is created through illusion in painting acquires actual volume, weight and transparency in glass. The image becomes an object, and light becomes an active component of the work.

It is precisely the contrast between the subject matter and the manner of its execution that generates one of the exhibition’s central tensions. Objects and symbols of contemporary culture, often short-lived and endlessly circulated as images in the digital environment, are translated into materials and techniques that demand time, physical labour and technological precision. The fleeting image is fixed in matter.

Pasta Oner neither celebrates nor unequivocally rejects his motifs. He is drawn to their inherent ambiguity. Desire, success, luxury, romance, nostalgia and the banality of everyday life coexist as parts of the same world. Irony is not a gesture of detachment, but a way of remaining within that world while simultaneously observing it.

The exhibition is therefore more than an encounter between painting and glass. Above all, it is a reflection on what happens when an image refuses to remain merely an image. When it acquires surface, depth, weight and fragility. When something we are accustomed to scrolling past on a screen in a matter of seconds begins to occupy real space before us.