Novan Erebus

Monuments to the Melancholic Body

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The monochromatic quality of Novan Erebus I & II and the sculptural work from the Hubris series situates viewers in a timeless, ambiguous zone, one that is both post cataclysmic and mythologically charged. Devoid of chromatic distraction, these works exist in a spectral register that amplifies form, gesture, and expression. The colorless surface operates as a kind of historical patina, a ghostly residue that invokes documents long buried, unearthed not from a known archive, but from a parallel mythology.

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The titles Novan Erebus suggest a new darkness, a constructed underworld where the bodies are not simply victims, but protagonists of a slow, sorrowful drama. Erebus, in myth, is not only darkness but the passage through which souls travel. These paintings are populated by exhausted forms wrapped in armored carapaces, melted visors, and folded limbs, cyborgian martyrs entangled in one another. There’s a classical pathos in the anatomical clarity, yet it’s skewed through a lens of synthetic futurism, as though Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa were re-imagined through a post-industrial, post-human trauma.

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Monochrome here is not aesthetic restraint but narrative necessity. These works are not painted in black and white; they are drawn from black and white. The lack of color sharpens the emotional landscape: anguish, resignation, and mourning are not performed in pigment, but exhaled in value shifts, muscle tension, the tilt of a head or the grasp of a disfigured hand. The figures appear as if lifted from an old manual of warfare or a lost forensic study, fragments of a civilization already decayed.

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The Hubris sculpture extends this narrative into three dimensions. The cast head, encased in the structural shell of what resembles a brutalist architectural element, evokes the monumentality of state authority while simultaneously crumbling under the weight of its own failure. The helmet: half protective shell, half cage, reinforces a sense of entrapment, of a being trapped within its own ideological architecture. The face, with its upward gaze and teardrop forms, channels the expressive gravity of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I—where the furrowed brow and downward pull of emotion suggest not just sadness, but metaphysical fatigue.

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Here, melancholia becomes more than mood; it is a historical condition. The weight of utopian aspirations, be they political, technological, or spiritual, has collapsed. What remains are the relics: bodies without resolve, gazes without future. The sculpture could plausibly be mistaken for an element salvaged from a brutalist ruin, a forgotten plinth, a once-ideological icon now turned funerary.

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In the continuity of Serkan Sarier’s work, the Hubris series and Novan Erebus paintings are not isolated gestures but chapters in a larger cosmology, a universe where the drone becomes a metaphor for marginalization, and where myth is re-engineered to account for the sociopolitical detritus of the present. These works carry forward his ongoing concern with how power is encoded into the figure, into the uniform, into the very textures of concrete and flesh. They speak to the inherent violence in monumentality and the melancholia of resistance.

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Yet, these works do not only mourn, they also preserve. There is an archival impulse here: a desire to salvage the emotional integrity of those rendered invisible. Like Dürer’s angel, surrounded by the collapsed tools of measurement and reason, these protagonists exist in a liminal pause, awaiting neither salvation nor resolution, but simply the dignity of being witnessed.

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Ultimately, the absence of color allows the figures themselves to become the dominant frequency. Their suffering is not aestheticized but structural, it’s in the repetition of bent spines, in the stillness of limbs that have given up motion. They are not individualized heroes, but collective echoes, monuments to the anonymous and the discarded. These are not statues for civic squares, but fossils for a future anthropology.