Echo

Emre Özakat’s working process at Villa Clea reflects his intention to bring an emotional archive of intangible digital moments back into the physical present. The paintings he presents, all new works created during his residency – oil on raw linen canvas – interpret residues of digital relics, materialising them through a meditative process of attention, whose echo we can perceive through the artist’s subjective interpretation. The house, designed by Matteo Corbellini using a single raw material, invites a renewed connection with the body and physical space. Emre’s residency within this rough architecture—shaped by natural light that enhances spatial perception—becomes a moment of dialogue with his artistic practice. Through painting, he collects traces, fragments, and signs of digital presence in timeless decay, bringing our attention back to the physical and tangible world. Through his practice, we become aware of the way he holds attention on these fleeting images, and as viewers, we actively participate in this reappropriation of digital experience. By once again rendering physical a subject gathered from the immaterial realm, Emre invites us to confront new realities—subjective echoes in constant return— that endure in a renewed present and within a tangible, spatial dimension. By engaging in his slow act of observation, we come to feel more deeply—through the works—his presence alongside our own, unfolding within time and space. The care given to this reappropriation of time and space—an act that can only emerge through an individual, subjective, and human choice—creates the conditions for meaningful encounters between people, places, and entities. Emre’s residency at Villa Clea thus becomes a concrete vehicle for such an encounter—physical and temporal, embodied and shared. — Allina Corbellini