UNDRGRND ARTIST: EVRENSEL BARIS BERKANT
NOVEMBER 18TH, 2022
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Reality often disappoints.
If we’re lucky, we get to enjoy a childhood filled with colorful simple animations like cartoons. Cartoons feed our imagination and create a world that bends reality.
Hopefully, we’ve been protected from the real world by our parents. We then view the end of our childhood when we become aware of the real world and the hard realities many people face. So do we return as adults cartoons to remind us of simpler times or to avoid the complex unforgiving nature of reality?
Turkish artist Evrensel Baris Bertkant has been animating cartoons for over 20 years holding on to that feeling of awe.
“Facts and the real world don’t interest me much,” says Evrensel, “I try to draw things that I like and that excites me. With NFTs, perhaps for the first time in my life, I have started to draw freely, as I wanted.”
This could be responsible for his fascination with steampunk design in his series of flying machines. But, Evrensel attributes it to his love for stories revolving around the apocalypse.
“I love fantastic things but I also have a melancholic nature. I like to watch/read apocalyptic stories and alternative lives in adapting to new conditions after the great destruction in those stories. With this aspect, the steampunk trend draws me in and satisfies me in many ways. Gears, steam, cables, complexities...I like these. So I say, ‘simple is not the best.”
His love for the melancholic influenced his musical taste as well. You can see this complexity and intricacies in his series Skullz Bands.
“I've listened to black and death metal for many years. As I got older, though, I transitioned to softer music. Skulls and the hard stuff are always present in black and death metal. Who doesn't love skulls anyway? This is part of human history. Death is always with us. And skulls are its symbol.”
Even though much of Evrensel’s work depicts magical, fun, animations you can feel the toll of reality bleeding into his cartoons when he begins to discuss his work.
This dichotomy of reality and imagination is most prevalent in his newest series Mad Dreams. This series captures the bizarre, freeing nature of dreams where little makes sense but everything feels new and possible. But, buried in the description is one line that reads, “No doubt it's a more fun place than our real life.” This ambiguous statement could read positively or negatively, depending on the viewer but also, in this case, the artist.
“It looks positive at first glance,” he says, “I didn't think it was positive or negative until I heard your question. I sleep much more than normal people. Sleep is an escape from the real world for me. There are so many misfortunes, injustices and pains in the real world. And they are all true. My mind can't get over them. I look forward to the moment when I wake up and go back to sleep. In this way, you get away from everything and you teleport to a world where there are fantastic things. This is great. Even if what you see is bad, you know it's not real. It's kind of like self-deception, but it puts me at ease. In short, from this point of view, that sentence contains both sides of negatives and positives.”
Whether avoiding reality or bringing hope to real life, Evrensel’s imagination is a gift we’re able to enjoy through his art.
