Hayri Agan’s painting comprises of compositions carefully crafted on the act of drawing and the vastness of the sea. The dark cities, sheds, rowboats, thick ropes tied into impossible knots, industrial compositions, geraniums that stare out of windows of sorrow that confront us repeatedly announce the possibility of the organic and the artificial to coexist in unexpected harmony. The painter, among the inventory of innumerable images, smells, voices and feelings that life constantly throws our way, chooses these things that are generally deemed ordinary and even ugly and we, through his mediation witness, to our surprise, the transformation of these frames taken from the quotidian, mundane moments of life into attractive set-ups discovered in darkness and chaos. These paintings that at first give us the impression of being tension filled screenshots from a dystopian movie or a vision of hell encountered through the brush of Hieronymus Bosch in fact picture the reality that we are experiencing at this moment in time. Cities weighed down by centuries of migration that have lost all hope of living up to their modernist ideals, and the lonely lives they create aren’t scenarios that are unfamiliar to us but this time; they have shed the desperation, hopelessness and omens of doom that are expected to accompany them. On the contrary, on a closer look, behind these moments that at first seem depressing are the rhythm of the sea, its air, the peace of observation, and a glimmer of hope that shines in neon colors through the paint, yearning for a happy ending despite all life’s troubles.