Shame

Through an intriguing close-up of a delicate and picturesque feminine face, Murat Pulat portrays Eva Rosenberg, the main character from Ingmar Bergman's black-and-white film Shame, dated 1968. The film starring actors Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow explores feelings of shame, jealousy, self-loathing and anxiety through a politically unaware couple attempting to flee a war-ravaged nation, fighting to survive.

Murat Pulat's expressive depictions of film scenes are often inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's celebrated cinematic career and it therefore
comes as no surprise that Shame was considered by many critics as Bergman's equivalent of Godard's Week-End. When Pulat adds colour to the black-and-white scene, he uses delicate strokes of blue, red and yellow carefully arranged in an attempt to create a sense of touch and add spark to the still image. The overall outcome is compelling as the viewer, drawn to multiple sensations, is stunned by the beauty of the image while the whirling touches of paint accentuate the sculptural and hypnotizing effect of the work.

The black and white touches of paint and the incorporated lines of shaded colour ironically allude to the television test cards in the 1960s and 1970s in which a set of coloured bars on television screens intended to assist viewers in the calibration of television sets. The artist's innovative appropriation of Pointillism coupled with the use of thick paint and a photorealistic technique reconstruct the image with painterly pixels as if to reverse the contemporary methods of expression.

In Shame, Murat Pulat gracefully recreates a moving moment in time through a delicate and striking composition.