Sila Candansayar: Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously
ARCO opening, booth 9OP16
March 4-8, 2026
View of the presentation: Sila Candansayar: Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously , ARCO Madrid , Spain.
Villa Magdalena is pleased to present Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously, for the upcoming edition of ARCO 2026,
a solo exhibition of new works by the Paris-based Turkish artist Sila Candansayar (b. Ankara, 1997). This presentation will include her most recent drawings and sculptures, conceived as a constellation within an ecosystem that unfolds from her vision of her surroundings.
Sila Candansayar, shows us a unique perspective on ”bodiness’, one in which mutant and artificial elements form
part of organic corporeality. Her notion of ’category mistakes’ is the underlying principle that guides her multimedia
installations, formal syntax, and representational ambiguity. A vocabulary of shapes that are informed by her visual
interests in physics, geometry, anatomy and mathematics: a sensibility partially informed by her father’s medical practice as a neuropsychiatric professor in Ankara, Turkey. Plato’s theory of the Platonic solids, with the five polyhedra and each one’s corresponding element in nature has been a fundamental reference in the evolution of her artistic language. The works’ dynamic methods of display and presentation also highlight the importance of the viewer’s experiential role. An invitation to a multiplicity of ways of seeing.
Her practice moves along the threshold between the visible and the untranslatable, where form, gesture, and matter
converge in a language that is both physical and poetic. Working with wood, clay, porcelain, cardboard, blown glass
and 3D printing, the artist explores the tension between the organic and the constructed, between intuitive movement
and deliberate structure. For Candansayar, sculpture is not only form but encounter: between body and matter, between
gesture and duration. Beneath this sculptural presence lies drawing as the origin of every movement -the first impulse
from which all volume is born. Across large cardboard surfaces, the initial matrices unfold: a circle becomes a sphere,
the sphere stretches into a polyhedron, and the dodecahedron repeats and transforms, extending the continuum
between line and body, thought and matter.
Her sculptures are deeply rooted in the memory of the body. Scattered throughout the exhibition space, two ceramic
tears -one on the floor and one on a pedestal- dialogue with a group of wooden sculptures that intersect across the
ground. These pieces take the shape of two open legs, joined at their joints by colored blown glass spheres, all held
beneath a white polyhedron with sharp edges. The unexpected combination of carved wood and synthetic geometry
reveals the artist’s interest in contrast: softness versus rigidity, play versus exertion, intuition versus precision. At the crossroads of mythology, science fiction, and social critique, Sila Candansayar stages objects with bodily dimensions in space. These sensual presences engage in dialogue with geometric forms and constraining frameworks.
”An inaccessible form may very well be our own body. We never perceive it except in fragments. I see my hands while
I write this text, and I can glimpse my feet. There are also things that are present, yet we choose to ignore them, like my nose, which is nonetheless visible if I decide to concentrate on it: it is enough for me to want to look at it, and I can just as quickly erase it with a simple thought.
Perhaps this is where my interest in fluid forms comes from, forms that are nothing more than gestures made with the
body to grasp its movement. Like a great beam of wood, carved very smoothly, standing between ceiling and floor and
linking them together. If one approaches, one may find oneself facing the piece upside down, reproducing its form in
reverse in order to observe it. To contemplate it in its entirety, it is enough to move the head up and down, as when one studies a person from head to toe.” -Sila Candansayar
Sila Candansayar (b. Ankara, 1997), Paris-based Turkish artist, graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des
Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2025. Recent solo exhibitions feature: Liber Pulveris, with Charlotte Simonnet (Galerie du Crous
de Paris, París, 2025); Tenders (Cabinet Studiolo, Milán, 2023). Recent group shows include: My Way: Sturtevant , Chris Burden, Sila Candansayar, Jimmie Durham, Latifa Echakhch, Michel Journiac, Jannis Kounellis, Philippe Meste, Gianni Motti, Cléo Perrin, Raymond Pettibon, Julien Previeux, Charlotte Simonnet, Internationale Situationniste, Lawrence Weiner (Galerie Michel Rein, París, 2026), Coller l’oreille aux colimacons (Les Réserves, Frac Ile-de-France, París, 2024); Sur le feu (Palais des Beaux-Arts, París, 2023). She is one of the four winners of the 2025 Diptyque Support and Launch Grants. In addition, Candansayar is also one of the three winners of the Mennour Emergence #3 programme.