On Geometry as Grammar: How Anatolian Carpets Became My Research Language

There is a moment in every research practice when you stop looking for sources and start looking for structures. For me, that moment happened in front of a kilim.

I had been thinking about geometric abstraction in contemporary painting — the Bauhaus inheritance, the minimalist tradition, the formal logic of reduction. But it was the kilim that made me understand that these were not inventions of the twentieth century. They were rediscoveries of something much older, woven into Anatolian floors for centuries before anyone named it modernism.

Pattern as Argument

What struck me was not the beauty of the patterns — though they are beautiful — but their structural intelligence. A kilim is not decorated; it is argued. Every geometric unit carries information: territorial, cosmological, familial, spatial. The pattern is not applied to the surface; it is the surface. Form and content are not separated.

This is the grammar I work with in my painting practice. Geometry not as decoration, not as formal exercise, but as a language — one that carries memory, ideology, and spatial instruction across centuries. My canvases are not about kilims. They are kilims read by a painter trained in Bauhaus principles, rewritten in oil and acrylic.

The Research Question

The question I return to, in every studio session and every series: how does a visual system carry what words cannot? How does repetition become rhythm? How does pattern become ideology without ever stating it? These are not questions about the past. They are questions about how we continue to organize experience through form — invisibly, structurally, today.