The Barlas Baylar Aesthetic

Looking back to shape the future.

It is an approach grounded in direct experience, it is a lifestyle all its own as well as an aesthetic that beholds the without from the within: it is the anthem of modern design in upscale furniture that is now found adorning celebrity mansions and high-profile residences.  Not an aspiration towards personal statements or expressions, such works appear both solemn and spontaneous, at once planned by man and crafted by nature herself.  Thus is revealed the utilitarian ethos despite the strictest sanctions against schools of thought and their theories.  Thus do untutored eyes see frivolities, for it is the subtlety of its own materials that imbue the noblest elegance – which is to say, the most prescient of silences – to a piece honestly crafted, bearing no thought of accolade or sale.

Where traditional skills had been shunned and modernity is identified with the machine, there was a reaction, or, to be more precise, a comeback, of the ancient, almost stoic, ethic equating being and doing.  This is why there can be no theory of design and no “movement” of the arts: such terms belong to metacognition, and not the all-powerful all-pervasive context of the great human unconscious.  This is why truly spontaneous furniture, like calligraphy, must arise out of its materials and cannot be merely assembled of them.  And this is why such an art can only be learned, never taught.

“Art,” an ironic word, signifying the artifice at the crux of reinterpreting nature.  But even as an actress may by her most cunningly depicted lies demonstrate a truth unattainable otherwise, so too might artists and artisans create works that are “natural” in spite of the sophist’s objections.  Besides, civilization must have its furnishings.  Yet the return to traditional ways in contemporary design has found a home in the most modern of settings, sleek if nature is thickly obtuse, minimal if nature had expanded through unmediated growth.  Therefore the modern furniture maker, one such as Barlas Baylar, integrating contemporary needs with ancient secrets handed down by village masters only plying their craft.

And a job well-done is the craft of these ancients, not of a world of art criticism and revolving fashions but pride of work and visions which can never be ossified by theory.  Intimately conscious of themselves as a part of the natural cycle, no distinction was made between nature’s discards and nature herself.  In our increasingly crowded world, where digital technologies can render neighbors too close and governments in our very beds, such so-called folk art is a reminder and a triumph of the human spirit.  Or as George Nakashima wrote, “it might even be a question of regaining one's own soul when desire and megalomania are rampant – the beauty of simple things.”