Hayal Pozanti’s Lush Paintings Magically Transform the Natural World

Relocation has long been essential to Hayal Pozanti’s painting practice. Little did she know that moving to Houston from Turkey at age eight, for example, would influence the sinuously abstract and buoyantly colored body of work for which she first became known a decade ago. That immersion in English, and the sudden return to Turkish a few years later when her family moved back home, inspired “Instant Paradise,” the series of paintings Pozanti created based on an imaginary alphabet she composed with 31 glyphs. Each shape refers to a letter in the English alphabet but possesses its own form. Pozanti configures them in various combinations to write, in a language entirely hers, feelings or ideas that speak to the wonder of existence—like “Number of variations in smiles that human beings possess,” or “Billions of neurons in the brain and the stars in the Milky Way.”

Pozanti started the “Instant Paradise” series with sharper forms, such as those she presented in her first institutional exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2015. The paintings eventually evolved into more fluid shapes around 2017, which was also when the artist settled in Los Angeles for three years. There, she was exposed to “hikes, backyards, palm trees, and coyotes” for the first time. This contact with nature loosened her brushstrokes. After years of cramped city life in Istanbul and New York, the natural world was not a far-away idea, but “something I was closely acquainted with, right by my house,” she said from her studio in a Zoom interview.

This environment provided the seeds of a new series, which she first unveiled at Timothy Taylor’s New York space last year. That show inaugurated her new artistic chapter with large paintings of natural vistas that seem both alien and familiar. With their uncompromising scales and joy in color, Pozanti’s landscapes beckon multiple interpretations, like dreams, or Rorschach tests in rainbow. Regardless of what the viewer sees, the artist’s decidedly personal translation of her world is apparent. On April 25th, Timothy Taylor’s London headquarters will open “Tender Mountain,” a second exhibition of works from the series featuring lush bursts of flowers and meteor-like raindrops.

The truly life-changing move that took Pozanti out of the urban mayhem and fomented this blossoming body of work was her relocation to Vermont during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. There, she has exchanged the tolling rituals of city life with a full bounty of natural wonders—birds chirping and long walks down the mountain toward her house. “My first reaction to seeing a water stream flowing behind my house or vegetation changing into full bloom was a visual explosion,” Pozanti said. This is reflected in works like When the Heart Meets Delight (all works 2024), which captures a capricious downpour with droplets brighter than shooting stars. They target gentle flowers in ruby and light purple, whose beauty seems to embolden them to face the torrent.

For an artist who always had an interest in biology and ecology, observing before her eyes the phenomena that she previously only saw in books or online was invigorating. “The way the molecules and the organisms come together around me create their new language as well,” she said, suggesting a connection between her earlier, language-oriented paintings and her new work. The artist considers the compositional gesture of writing a sentence similar to nature’s own acts of creation.

“Frightening,” is how Pozanti characterizes her decision to veer away from the visual language that brought her institutional and commercial success after she graduated from Yale with an MFA in printmaking in 2011. “I had to do it without thinking about the consequences too much,” the 41-year-old said, adding that “this is the work that was coming out of me with full sincerity.”

Landscape paintings with abstract cues are hardly radical, but there is a subtle yet firm gesture in Pozanti’s positioning: As an immigrant artist, she stakes a claim to the terrain of a country where some might consider her an outsider. “This is how I see the world around me and this language is what I bring to the table,” she said. “I have created the world for myself the way I’d like to live it.”

The artist’s studio ritual has experienced a major change along the way, too. Whenever the precarious New England weather permits, Pozanti finds herself out in nature, making countless sketches of a placid lake, a tree with brittle branches, or other elements of the landscape. Freeing herself from mere observation, Pozanti allows emotion to seep into her work, resulting in surreal imagery. “They are proposals for a world that could be,” she explained. “They are the results of a magical process of what goes through my head. They chronicle how I felt in that exact moment when I looked at the sun or saw a flower fall.” This approach recalls the way she transformed a collective tool like language into a highly personal, and even mysterious, resource in her previous work.

Back at the studio, Pozanti selects sketches that eventually lead to large-scale paintings in which touch is the key. She paints entirely with her finger, which lets her connect with the linen surface and the subject matter in a more intimate and almost maternal way. “I am like a cave painter or a chemist mixing different compounds,” she said.