Okan Mentes photographs in black and white what most people overlook: the aesthetics of everyday and even decidedly ugly places — a traffic sign, a paving stone, the water swirling down a train toilet. Who, what, where and when are irrelevant; what remains is the pure experience of the composition.
As a nineteen-year-old from Brussels he presented the solo exhibition Okan-is-me at DeNode (2025, curator Damien Degrave) — not a loud declaration of a coherent philosophy, but an inquisitive search for scattered beauty, accompanied by an essay by Jakob de Smaele.
