WHAT IS ID?

Does someone is formed of the experiences he has gained during his life, or is he born with an accumulated past and an unchanging substance that has been engraved in his genetic codes? Necmi Gürseler's answers to these questions with his paintings show that he is in search of a spiritual self. This essence is the "ID". While accepting relativity and spiritual evolution, as he wants to draw a limit to them, he tries to remove the traces of the post/modern human's built psychology from the pre-modern period. For Gürseler, when the artificial constructions of the modern and post-modern era are removed, what remains is the universal origins of the substance of human beings. According to him, no matter how much personal experiences transform, no matter how much post/modernization covers, man has an unconsciousness that resists rationality, can only be expressed through mythological narratives, independent of his own consciousness and common with all humanity. This collective unconsciousness is reflected on all decisions of the person, regardless of the date and geography. What is dangerous for Gürseler is that the Id, which is the ground of the collective unconscious in the roots, is tamed by first modernity and then by post-modernity. Fiction opposes the cultural swallowing of what it sees as essential/natural, the primitive: One must turn from the Artificial to his Essence.

But what is essence? The collective unconscious is invisible, intangible, undefinable. It's a feeling. Gürseler does not focus on what the collective unconscious is, but what it would look like if it could be seen. The feeling of the Essence, that is, the primitive self, can only be reproduced through symbols and this produced can reach a common meaning. Gürseler has to rely on some familiar visuals in order to describe his narrative in a way that produces a common meaning, as he selects mythological signs as the most suitable images for the Id. Therefore, Gürseler's paintings organize the stories that rediscover/produce mythology, the figures that enliven these stories, and the networks of meanings that bear those figures. These networks of meaning are not signs that are certain about the meaning they spread, but symbols whose interpretability extends to infinity. No image is in its own task, all of them are equipped with meaning possibilities that exceed what they show. It's a portal of archetypes, a journey from the canvas to the inside of the human, a guide to delving into the previously undiscovered depths in which each person can reveal their different aspects through their own personal experiences; an archaeological excavation of the collective unconscious.

These paintings are not painted with consciousness, but with the unconscious, due to the field of research. Neither a sketch nor a fiction, Gürseler sits on the canvas and creates his line-dominated narrative in one fell swoop. He portrays the collective unconscious with its unconscious relations with the collective. Gürseler's paintings are a relationship between the unconscious.

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