Full of swirling organic forms, Hayal Pozanti’s paintings pulse and vibrate with life, drawing the viewer in with an undeniable kinetic energy and force. To look at a painting by Pozanti is to revel in the beauty and grandeur of the natural world. 

Pleasures Newly Found, on view at Jessica Silverman, features 12 new oil paintings by the Turkish-American artist. The paintings reflect Pozanti’s observations of and reactions to the natural world, particularly Vermont, where she lives and works. “I probably have some sort of synesthesia,” says Pozanti. “I can’t walk two steps without being like, ‘Look, what is that?’ It’s almost like things shine up at me.” I have a similar sentiment when looking at the paintings in Pleasures Newly Found, so vivid that they practically shimmer. A sense of transcendence and awe permeates the work, the blissful feeling one gets after being fully immersed in nature. 

“What really compelled me, apart from my admiration and awe of the natural world and my sincere interest in conserving it, is that I was also thinking about how, as human beings, we can get back to our creativity and creative selves by reconnecting with the natural world,” explains Pozanti. “Because that’s something that we’re losing. We’re so divorced from it. Even when we’re out in nature, we’re busy recording it on a phone or thinking [rather] than just being in it. I wanted to have a daily practice in which both my work and my life is spent reconnecting with the natural world. And through that reflection, remembering what it is to have a body, to be in a body, to be embodied, and to experience the world as a human being with all my senses.”

Pozanti is perhaps best known for Instant Paradise, a visual language she created over a decade ago. Featuring 31 unique glyphs, Instant Paradise reflects Pozanti’s fascination with the history of writing as it relates to human evolution and development. “When I was thinking about making a language, I had very utopian instincts,” Pozanti explains. She wanted to create “a globalized visual language with transcendent borders.” Instant Paradise has evolved greatly since. “When you start in a language, it's very basic,” offers Pozanti. “You write your name. I think I was doing that, and then I wrote sentences for a while.” If one thinks about looking at Pozanti’s work as a form of reading, one can see that she’s now writing “paragraphs and stories,” as she puts it. “Now when I look at the world and I’m sketching something, I see an outline and it reminds me of one of my shapes,” elaborates Pozanti. “What I usually do is then start mimicking that instead of replicating exactly what I see. So I’m not making an exact representation of what I’m seeing. It’s almost like the world is speaking to me and then I’m translating it.”

Painting for Pozanti is a deeply embodied process. “I think about my work as being very athletic,” she says. She works with canvases that often triple her in size, moving up, down, and across them by standing on milk stools. She paints by hand, sweeping the paint across the canvas with her fingers. “It’s very organic,” Pozanti says. Oil and sweat from her glands transfer onto the canvases made out of linen, which she prefers because of its organic nature, but also for how it reacts to color. “When you paint on white, there’s a reflection that happens,” Pozanti elucidates. “When you paint on linen, the color absorbs a little more onto the canvas, so you can use white as a color. That’s something I think about a lot, creating moments of focus and spark with white.” 

I couldn’t help but think about our relationship to artificial intelligence when looking at Pozanti’s paintings. I wondered what new shapes language will take on as AI transforms how we read, think, and write. Will it, could it, look something like the forms in Pozanti’s paintings? 

“I've come to this technique of making and this methodology of existing because of my personal reaction to screens, social media, and the development of AI,” Pozanti tells me. “I've chosen a world, I've created a life for myself, which is incredibly privileged, and I totally understand that most people can't do that. But I had an opportunity and I chose to go down this path. I said, ‘I'm going to spend most of my time away from a screen and sit out in nature, and I'm going to be in nature and paint natural things. I'm going to switch the paints that I use from acrylic to more sustainable oil sticks that are not non-toxic. And I'm going to meditate most of the day, and I'm going to be in my body. I'm not going to look at a screen.”’

I looked at Pozanti’s paintings and thought of my garden, how dizzied with life it seemed in the spring, the world teeming with color. I looked and felt a sudden sense of awe at the fact of my body. I looked and felt grateful to be alive. What a pleasure it was to be in Pozanti’s world.

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Written by Elodie Saint-Louis