John Berger said in his book, “Ways of Seeing”: The uniqueness of each painting was part of the uniqueness of a particular time. Sometimes it was carried from where it was to a different place. However, it was never seen in two places at once. When the camera took the photograph of a painting, its meaning changed. To put it more precisely, the meaning of a painting multiplied and was divided into different meanings. What does the contemporary artist think about the commodification of a painting and the loss of its uniqueness. Can we disregard the problematical questions that John Berger has put forward? I viewed the exhibition by Ercüment Tarhan on 7th November in Dost Sanat Ortamı Gallery, posing these questions to myself.

Ercüment Tarhan tells about his life story as follows:
–I was born in Iğdır in 1956. I completed my elementary school and secondary school education in Iğdır. I’ve been involved in art and poetry since I was a student in secondary school. It wasn’t ever an obstacle for me going to school and doing art work. When I entered the Academy in 1977, art became my primary concern. After I got an award in the Young Poets Competition organized by the Art Academy I postponed writing poems for a while. Because the problems relating to art became more dominant. I tried to bring poetry close to art after then.

– I don’t like asking this question; however, I still want to ask. Why are you engaged in art?
-I believe painting is the only thing I can do. If I do anything other than this, I will do it for the sake of my art.
-This is your first personal exhibition. Have you taken part in group exhibitions before?
-Yes. I took part in two group exhibitions , one in Bandırma and the other in İstanbul.

There are other things that I want to learn from Ercüment Tarhan. Is it possible to express the outcome of the perceptive experiments on canvas if the innate relationships among human beings or between human beings and nature are not known? When I look at the painting “Two Cleaning Ladies” (or his other paintings) the expression is neither
concentrated in the face nor in any other part of the figure. Expression is concentrated in a composition
that is focused on productive activity. All the objects are important and unimportant at the same time. In his paintings, I come across ordinary events of everyday life, domestic life reminiscent of Flemish paintings . He chooses to depict delimited interior space in his paintings. The ordinary nature of daily activities is stressed even further for he uses limited colour.

In the painting “belonging to the night”, the emotionality of a child listening to the womb of his pregnant mother is depicted by cold colors and so the story is kept away from dramatization. In the painting “whose gardens we trespassed” I see the digestion of the classical art education that he had acquired, in the way he expresses the mechanical relationship between objects and people during productive activity, without disregarding the inner personal feelings.

In this painting, the peasant girl standing with a milk pan in her hands looked as if she were identified with her pan; the movement of the figure is given by the firm stance of her feet standing with the toes apart. There is an underlying stillness in the relationship between human beings and objects that gradually look like each other. In the background, the pinched look of the other peasant woman leaning on the fence on the left is carried on to the look of the goat that looks out from the fence. A stillness that is questioning. I am trying to understand Ercüment Tarhan’s paintings within the scope of the artistic language characteristic of Neşet Günal’s Studio.

Today even if an artist doesn’t have an aim other than being an artist, we can detect whether he has got “a contemporary sensitivity” by looking at his works as a whole. The situation of the world today is not solely an objective reality. Consciousness is part of this reality. In this case, have artists quit the role of expressing the rewards of virtue and the penalties of vice, the role that they have undertaken for hundreds of years? Today, too, an artist witnesses certain events and detects the facts. How might the artist have used his extra consciousness when he declares that he wants to draw the beautiful in such a chaotic medium of production relations where the values of beauty are in such a flux? New questions follow my previous questions as I tour the exhibition. I want to learn which method Ercüment Tarhan uses as he treats plastic elements.

-How do you evaluate the language and questions relating to form in the history of art?
-I do not support non-figurative art.

-How do the elements of Flemish world coincide with elements in the cultural world of Turkey? How do the images that affect your art correspond to your world of imagination?
-If I can explain this in my painting “Goats that do not come back”: I want to call upon my memory. I don’t want to be totally descriptive; however, I want to visualize what is descriptive together with the objective upon a plastic plane. I grazed our sheep till I was 16. One day, a kid goat did not want to go into the pen and escaped. I followed him, but could not catch him. As I followed him, I had gone to the skirt of the mountain. The goat had drawn me to the mountains. I cried. We searched for him with my family members that night; we could not find him. The next day, the kid goat returned having joined another flock of sheep. When I entered the Academy, this nostalgic event came up into my consciousness in the language of art in this way. Rural themes dominate my paintings. It is necessary for me to create a style to depict the return to the rural.

-I understand that the 23 years in Anatolia have been a resource for the language of your art. Which plastic values accompany this nostalgic fact as you try to build a contact with the viewer?
-I try to choose the objects that are part of our lives, our possessions. In the series, “Bells” or “Fenced Fences” I don’t tell a story to the viewer. I present a critical approach to the critical look of the viewer. And I do this in a poetic manner.

-Can you explain how it is possible to present such a criticism to the viewer? Can you keep the objects of art from being mystified? In Velasquez, we see the mystification of objects, however, in Goya’s black paintings, this mystification is replaced with criticism. Your objects, too, are sequenced within a space of viewing the viewer; how do you explain this?
-I am trying to catch the poetry in people I know or the environment that I am acquainted with or the objects that I see. This tendency is due to my close interest in poetry. Such a poetic manner is not alien to us socially, either. The will to visualize poetic criticism on a figurative plastic plane, brings the language of art to the common language in use among other works of art and culture. In my painting “The Diplome”, for example, I tried to deliver the critique through in the structure of black humour.

-Thank you.

Şükran Moral