life is choice - evrim ilhan

Life Is Choice unfolds on a chessboard of chance. The black-and-white checkered ground and the banknotes repeating beneath it set the stakes of the game: risk, luck and value. A jester in a suit-patterned cap, a face echoing Dalí, presides as both croupier and player, while the declaration “I’m the master of my fate” opens the work with an act of will. A vertical axis of cobalt drips cuts through the canvas, forming a crying face with crossed-out eyes and a stitched mouth, the emotional core of the piece. Around it, magazine collage, hand-painted lilies, a prowling leopard and stitched patches of imagery coexist. A bronze figure climbs a ladder along a UFO’s striped beam toward the unknown. Real metal toy cars, mounted directly on the surface, dissolve the border between painting and world. A framed Van Gogh and a television declaring “Not everything you see is the truth!” question the reliability of seeing itself. The work resolves in its central text: luck was not magic, it was a choice. What matters here is not fate or coincidence, but the courage to answer it.