At the crossroads of an increasingly interconnected world, Istanbul has always offered a pageant and a spectacle. Remembered through the lens of Arman Suciyan’s childhood and later journeys across the globe, the Men’s Collection is redolent of a bold, colorful midcentury city, straddling two continents like electrical currents, its streets plied by water sellers, gendarmes in their white hats and holsters, cart horses sharing the narrow streets with men in business suits and the muscular glamour of western automobiles.
Washed by the counter- and cross-cultural confluence of four seas, from the late 1950s through the mid-1970s, Istanbul became the portal through which hundreds of thousands of western travelers flowed into the East along the Hippie Trail. They were pilgrims of a sort, in search of something deeper, shared, and more authentic. In this collection, Suciyan has sculpted that city into graphical forms and converted speed and motion into emotion and sensuality. Each piece recalls some detail that distinguished vintage foreign automobile models: logos like heraldic shields and bowsprit-worthy hood ornaments, the brake lights of Fords, the tail fins and rocket bumpers of ‘57 Chevies and the toothy grin of the DeSoto’s front grill. Drawn to the aerodynamic bullets, wings, fins, flames, headlamps and hoods--as exotic to Suciyan as swaying Spanish galleons, ancient spaceships, or mechanized suits of armor--he found beauty in the contrast between their shiny chrome and the rust and peeling paint as they aged, and the world aged with them.
Today, hand-sculpted in wax and cast in silver or bronze, finished with enamel, oxidizing and brushing, the Men’s Collection riffs on the forms that embodied that new Age of Man, an era of science and space travel, art and industry, entrepreneurism and optimism, when a man made his own path by driving it.