The slow alchemy of @Leyla Gediz’s work

We visited @leylagediz's studio-home which revealed itself like a living archive, where canvases lived in her living room, leaned against kitchen walls, and rested in her hallways. In our interview, she unpacks the layered narratives behind her work.

@MOCHIS Let’s begin at the beginning. You’ve said, in our visit, that teaching art is dangerous, that a teacher should open a student’s eyes, never impose. When you left behind mentors and entered the studio alone, how did you learn to trust your own instincts?

@LG When I left school it was important to make a fresh start by unlearning everything. So I did a cute thing: I resorted to my childhood drawings. Luckily, my mother had kept quite a lot of them.

My approach was both intuitive and conceptual. I took fragments from my childhood drawings and applied them on my canvases in order to tell new and adult stories. This method of play seemed safe and away from dogmas. I would give my paintings cliché titles such as ‘I wish I did that’ or ‘I would’ve done that better’ addressing my own, remorseless desire to create and to compete.

@MOCHIS When we visited you, you also told us something had shifted: a lightning moment, a sudden rearrangement of perception. What happens to an artist when they are altered like this? What becomes visible in dispossession, when illusions of identity fall away? And what kind of work is born from that space?

@LG Well, I don’t believe it happens by itself, something triggers it for sure, and maybe that’s a culmination of many months behind that single moment. It can happen spiritually, it can happen upon an energy treatment, hours of meditation or a detox… For me it’s about protecting your inner life, your personal space. When I feel naked like that, I take a piece of chalk and start drawing random stuff on paper. I never show or even keep any of that stuff, because the point isn’t to prove anything to anyone else but you that you can let go of what holds you down. It’s a type of exorcism, followed by inner calm and deeper self-love.

Every now and again I need to

remind myself that I too can flex and

transform – it’s mandatory work to push

things forward in the studio.

@MOCHIS Your studio seemed to spill gently into the rest of your home: a large canvas in the living room, frames above the cupboards, a quiet workspace at the back. What does that closeness allow for in your process?

@LG I have long made an association between my immediate surroundings and my picture plane. I mean, anything I paint has its presence in my actual life. A painter cannot always afford to have a separate studio. Most painters work from home. And when this is the case, anything in your house can enter your painting.

I like it in so far as there are no big intrusions such as the existence of other people sharing the apartment with you. That’s tricky but can also be inspiring. I used to live with a boyfriend who kept leaving his dirty socks lying about. I was so fed up with this that in the end I made these two gigantic sculptures out of epoxy and hand-painted them – a pair of socks, The Other Pair (2010) is today in a permanent museum collection!

@MOCHIS Your paintings often carry a strong scenographic presence: gestures borrowed from theatre, cinema, or imagined stages. When composing a scene, are you thinking like a painter or like a director? Is scenography for you a method of framing the real?

@LG I think more like an author as I am composing them and like a painter as I am painting them and like a director when I am finally installing them. The final product is always the exhibition. I feel that I am designing an experience for the viewer. Individually speaking, of course each painting counts as a piece in itself, in the end it is the paintings that I am selling. But a painting cannot come to life without a context, so my job is primarily to create the context, and that comes through listening, reading, writing, rewriting and a lot of visual research, including films, theatre, opera and dance. Framing, as you put it, must be done but with an end to open up a discussion around what’s real, rather than boxing it in to one perspective alone. I strive for multiple readings that can only be allowed by multiple perspectives. If mine is a stage, it is an immersive stage that you can step in and wander about.

@MOCHIS There’s a sense that you live with your paintings for a long time. That you sit with them, let them change you. You’ve described painting as a spiritual act and once said that its power lies in how much time you take with it. What does that duration do? Not just to the painting but to you?

@LG The more hours you put into a painting gives it the profound depth that ensures its aura. I tend to think about paintings as time capsules. The only way I can separate myself from a painting is when I know I’ve given it all the attention and care I possibly could, and that takes time. At times work must be interrupted and I take long intervals between two sittings. Partly for technical reasons, like I want the layers to settle, but more importantly, I do this to see how the painting stands the test of time.

A few months after putting down the first layer, if the painting still catches my eye and shows potential, then I’ll take it further. Sometimes this time lapse causes my perspective to change, and in that case I need to make changes to my original composition. This is what happened in one of my most recent paintings, Pentimento (2025).

I felt the need to pull the protagonist, whom I had painted beyond the edge of the canvas, back into the centre, and was therefore compelled to rearrange the entire composition. Equating myself with the protagonist made all this effort worthwhile.

The bottom line is that I need to release

these paintings from my heart and leave them

behind in order to move forward in my life.