Deformation as a reception tool in painting and its reflections on contemporary art practice

Art is undoubtedly one of the oldest and most effective means of communication in human history. For thousands of years, people have expressed their feelings, thoughts and experiences through art. Each art has its own language and form of expression. Among these forms of expression, the language of the art of painting is inherently more limited than other arts. In the art of painting, there are a limited number of instruments that will enable the expression of emotions and thoughts. For example, like the art of music, it does not have unlimited possibilities to express the concrete existence of emotions or the wide possibilities of verbal arts in the expression of thoughts. Forms, which we can call the most important instrument of painting, may not always have ideal geometry at the point of conveying emotions and thoughts. For this reason, in the relationship between form and content, artists have pushed the limits of form in order to increase the carrying capacity of content. By distorting the form of the objective world, they have tried new methods to communicate their inner stirrings. In this context, this research examines what kind of a relationship exists between form and content in a work of art that determines meaning and affects expression, and how the element of deformation is handled as a means of reception within this dialectical relationship. This study aims to contribute to the discussions in this field by examining the existence, necessity and importance of the element of deformation that affects the relationship between form and content. In this direction, the concepts and discussions on the subject are tried to be explained with examples of important works in the history of art. Although this study is limited to the art of painting, since Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Mesopotamian, Hittite, Central Asian and Assyrian painting works have not survived to the present day, reliefs showing similar characteristics with the painting understanding of that period have also been tried to be emphasized. After the examination of the procession, the application of the deformation element, which is a form of expression, was realized using acrylic paint technique on canvas. Written and visual data other than the specified subjects and concepts were excluded from the scope of the research. As a result of the research, it was found that the element of deformation affects the relationship between form and content and strengthens the expression.