Revaleka

Every object that once felt familiar in our daily lives eventually becomes an artifact. Not because it disappears, but because the world keeps moving and leaves it behind. What remains is not its function, but the affection it left in our collective memory. Nostalgia works this way. It does not record the past as it actually was, it reconstructs it based on how it felt.

Still Life is the seventh album in my discography, and maybe the most dilemmatic and desperate one so far. This is not just a new album in my practice, it is a response to the existential anxiety of a conventional artist in the middle of a technological invasion that can reproduce visuals without ever experiencing anything. This is also my most exploratory era, where I try to survive in a way that might sound contradictory, at least to me, which is working alongside the very thing I fear.

The way I work is probably different from most artists who respond reactively to what happens around them. I tend to prepare my albums long in advance, intentionally and structurally. Years ago, I already started imagining what I would be working on in the years ahead, how one album would speak to the one before it, and how my entire practice would grow as one long, coherent narrative.

In short, Still Life did not appear suddenly in 2026. I have been planning it for a long time as part of a bigger evolution in how I see nostalgia, memory, and how images are produced and consumed today.

This album consists of 58 oil paintings representing domestic objects with strong nostalgic value. Objects that were once common in everyday life, but are now increasingly rare or already obsolete. Coin operated payphones known as "Wartel," cassette tapes, floppy disks, Game Boys, iPods, and dozens of other objects that once existed without us even noticing, can now only be found in the corners of secondhand shops or in family photo albums that have started to yellow.

But unlike traditional still life, which usually celebrates formal beauty and carefully measured composition, I am drawn instead to an approach that is more impulsive and spontaneous. I am inspired by the aesthetics of instant photography, cameras like Fujifilm Instax and Polaroid, where people capture moments in their lives without complicated technical consideration, without accomplished photography skills, yet produce visuals that are beautiful precisely because of their authenticity. There is something very honest in an imperfect shot. A tilted composition, a missed focus, cropping that is too tight, or unintentional motion blur become proof that the moment actually happened.

In Still Life, I try to translate that impulsive quality into oil paint. I paint these nostalgic objects as if they were snapshots taken without preparation. Compositions that are not always balanced, framing that is sometimes too tight or too loose, and elements borrowed directly from instant camera aesthetics, the white frame typical of Instax and Polaroid, colors that are slightly faded like a photograph starting to fade, sometimes contrast, and sometimes small distortions that make the object feel more alive than a formal still life that can feel too sterile.

What sets Still Life apart from my previous albums is that this is not about the human figure. This is a total departure from the dissolving identity gesture I have centered on so far. There is no blur like in Memento, no silhouette like in Silhouette, no blinding flash dissolving the figure like in Overexposed. This time, I am working with dead objects. But that does not mean I am abandoning my principle of opening space for interpretation. The objects I present still function as placeholders, as an invitation for the viewer to project their own memories.

I began incubating this album in late 2024, and throughout 2025 I quietly started showing a few Still Life works here and there. I called it "geli-gelian," a kind of teaser I threw out to the public without much explanation, just to see how people would respond to a visual different from what I usually present. Some works I posted on social media without clear context, some I showed in casual conversations with colleagues, collectors, or curators, all as a slow form of preparation for the full release of this album in 2026. Working this way gave me room to test ideas, watch early reactions, and mature the concept without the pressure of having to be perfect right away.

As the process of incubating and maturing Still Life continued, I realized this album was not only about nostalgia. It grew into something more complex. Every object I chose was chosen with very specific semiotic consideration. I genuinely thought about what a single object could tell, not only as a trigger for memory, but also as a medium for addressing contemporary issues relevant to our lives today.

No object in Still Life points explicitly to a single issue or narrative. Everything is designed to work on multiple levels at once. It can be read plainly by anyone as simply an old object that triggers memory, but it can also be read very deeply by those willing to stop and look longer. A plain visual, but a complex narrative. This is how I bring contemporary issues in the way most familiar to who I am.

Actually, Still Life is not my first collaboration with artificial intelligence. I started experimenting with AI back in 2021, long before this technology became a widely discussed topic. Back then, AI still felt like an exciting new toy, something I could explore without feeling that my existence as an artist was at stake. But its development in recent years has moved far faster than I imagined. What once felt like a casual experiment suddenly became a very real reality, where this technology could not only help, but also potentially replace. That is where my anxiety began to surface. Not because I was new to AI, but precisely because I had already been with it long enough to know how far it could go.

I use AI to generate visual references for the paintings in the Still Life era. This does not mean I hand over creative autonomy to the machine. I still decide what objects appear, how the composition works, how the visual aesthetic should feel. AI helps me realize visualizations I have already conceptualized, especially for objects that are hard to find physically or already very rare. It works like a tireless, obedient studio assistant with no opinions of its own.

But beyond oil painting as the base medium for creating this work, I am also exploring many other things in the Still Life era. I make digital works based on image and video, web and web3, installation, and even experiments with generative AI as an independent medium. One of my parallel explorations is creating pseudo documentation of nostalgia using AI, where I generate nostalgic objects that never actually existed, yet feel very familiar because they are shaped by an algorithm trained on the visual aesthetics of the past. I then print these objects in instant photography format and present them as installations that replicate the way people display memories in their private spaces.

This exploration became a form of reflection for me on how technology today shapes and even replaces collective memory. What happens when memory no longer comes from direct experience, but is constructed by a machine? When AI can create images that look like our own personal memories, can we still tell the difference between what we actually experienced and what we only feel like we experienced?

My anxiety toward AI has not fully gone away. To this day, I still ask myself whether all of this is the right step or whether I am digging my own hole and my own grave. But I choose to stay productive with that unease. I choose to see AI not as a replacement, but as a collaborator, even as an apprentice I can teach about how an image should be made with deep consideration, not just by following existing patterns.

Still Life, in the end, is an album about survival. Not only surviving technically to stay relevant amid ever advancing technology, but also surviving in identity as an artist with a certain way of seeing and certain principles about how a work should function. I remain committed to the 58 oil paintings as the core of this album, as proof that the human hand, human intuition, and human experience still have a place in a world increasingly filled with synthesized images.

But at the same time, I am not closing my eyes to the new possibilities technology offers. I see AI not as a threat to fight, but as a new brush I can use to expand the scope of my visual exploration. I want to push how far I can bring AI into my practice without losing my identity as a conventional artist.

The objects in Still Life are silent witnesses of a past that has already passed. But the way I present them, the way I paint them, and the way I respond to the technology I use to realize them are my own statement about how we should treat the past in the present era. Nostalgia is not only about longing for something that is gone. It is also about how we choose to remember, how we choose to reconstruct, and how we choose to retell.

In a world that keeps moving faster, more digital, and more filled with images produced without experience, I want Still Life to be a reminder that there is value in things that are slow, manual, and considered. But I also want it to be proof that the conventional artist will not die in the age of AI. We just need to be smarter in how we negotiate with that technology.

Still Life, for me, is also a paradox. The plainest visual with the most complex argument. Dead objects that are in fact very alive in our collective memory. Technology with no experience of its own, yet capable of reproducing nostalgia. And an artist desperate enough to decide to take the leap.

This is how I survive.