The practice of Mustafa Hulusi orbits around mining his hybrid identity – he was born in London to Cypriot-Turkish parents – to create evocative paintings, installations, films, and photographs.
By combining different epochal art historical references with diverse geographic artistic styles Hulusi investigates how different visual ‘languages’ shape our perception. His work often scrutinises the traditional conflation of abstraction and representation and questions how this combination of codes affects viewer perception.
The visually morphing NFT animation titled Acid Communism probes the notion of division and is presented here in a binary split screen of hyper saturated figuration on one side and geometric trance-like abstraction on the other.
The figuration element sources a suite of paintings titled Bitter Oranges (2021) – the original photographic images were taken in the northern region Cyprus famous for its citrus fruits. Known as Morphou (in Greek) or Guzelyurt (in Turkish), the original groves were established during the British mandate period in the early C20th, and it is said this breed of orange tree partly originates from those found in the Jaffa region in Palestine. That something can taste so sweet and pleasurable yet can also contain the bleak history attesting to colonialism and its grim plantation system is one aim of these paintings: that barbarism and civilisation appear often to be inseparable.
They are juxtaposed with trippy coloured, kinetic op-art geometric abstract forms that are a continuation from his earlier painting series titled Expander (2006-present).
Operating upon the principle of sacred geometry, these images are influenced by psychedelic philosopher Terrence McKenna who propagates the necessity of a mystic relationship with the world as means of obtaining the creative potential within us all.
Acid Communism also aims to touch upon early C20th French philosopher Georges Batailles assertion that consequential art involves a rapture between the boundary between life and death, mixing the sacred and the profane. Or put another way, a communion between the bounded self and the immeasurable void.
