Red is a color capable of carrying opposing meanings at once. It can evoke life and blood, desire and danger, warmth and wound. It resists being fixed to a single symbolic meaning; the emotion it conveys shifts according to its tone, intensity, texture, and context.

In Divan poetry, this multilayered nature of red is concentrated in the image of la‘l. A brilliant red, translucent precious stone, la‘l is identified with the beloved’s lips in Divan literature; it is likened to wine, blood, and the lover’s bloodied tears. A legend that describes la‘l as originally being a white stone that turns red after being stained with blood and left beneath the sun transforms it into a symbol not only of beauty and value, but also of suffering and transformation. The breaking of the stone, its coloring with the blood of the liver, and its ripening under the sun are associated in Divan poetry with the lover’s own transformation through patience and grief. In this way, la‘l brings desire and pain, beauty and wound, value and fragility together within a single image.

In this exhibition, the artist explores themes such as love, loneliness, longing, separation, wound, pain, suffering, and transformation through different formal uses of red. In some works, red appears as a warm and intense atmosphere that envelops the entire surface; in others, it emerges as a sudden stain, a sharp intervention, or an accent that evokes life and blood. As the tone and intensity of the color, the movement of the brush, and its relationship with the surface change, so too does the emotion it carries.

Within the visual language the artist has developed over time, calligraphic traces, gestural movements, dense textures, and layered surfaces come together in different ways. In some works, the movement of the brush and the immediacy of the gesture come to the fore; in others, the material relationship between color and surface becomes more decisive. In certain works, these two approaches intersect on the same surface. Red therefore appears at times as a dynamic and expressive gesture, at times as a dense and immersive field of textured color, and at times as a layered mode of expression that holds both qualities simultaneously.

Throughout the exhibition, red is treated not merely as a color or a symbol, but as an expressive language that determines the very construction of the works. It envelops the surface, interrupts it, directs it, or intensifies at a particular point. As its mode of use changes, it opens up different emotional territories between love and loss, passion and wound, intimacy and violence.

L’âl takes its name both from a historical and poetic image of red in Divan literature and from the artist’s own name. Within this personal and cultural intersection, the exhibition transforms red from something merely seen into an experience that is felt, remembered, and leaves a trace.

LAL DEMİR