Without glorifying their subject matter Gülderen Depas' paintings depict fires, destruction and explosions. Buses burn, debris is thrown from the ground and smoke plumes fill the skies. While her paintings could be imagined as a series of responses to one major event, a war or terrorist attack, they can also be seen as the many completely unconnected, dispersed but similarly violent occurrences that take place throughout the world every day. Either way the repetition of the content seems to speak of the never-ending violent nature of humanity and the fact that all such atrocities leave trauma and devastation in their wake.

While the saying goes "where there's smoke there's fire", when Depas' paintings are not seen together at the same time, the smoke, especially due to its painterly movements, can be read in another way—as the dying down of the flames, or taken to its extreme as nothing more than a hazy wash in the sky. It's only later, after encountering all the works, that the chain of atrocities they seem to represent is composed in the viewer's memory. And what does this say of human nature? Are we intent on seeing the worst in every situation? Is the media coverage of human destruction so implicit in our lives that every image of fire immediately resounds as war? By fragmenting her scenes between different canvases and choosing the medium of paint to loosely portray these scenes, Depas poses such questions and tempts us to reconsider the content she presents.

Her title for the series: 'Chaos, Violence, Space' also leaves things open. There is violence, but it's contained in various different compositions; there is chaos, but this could also be the chaos of nature – earthquakes, volcanoes, the complexities of the universe; and ultimately there is also space – a space to contemplate an alternative imagery in the sweeping brush-strokes she has applied, a more positive imaginary to that which many of us have been manipulated by the media and our obsession with war to instinctively see.

                                                                                                                                                                                         November Paynter