Gösteri Journal – February 2000

My attempt to write about Ercüment Tarhan’s painting can only take its departure from my awareness of the impossibility of making an objective assessment of his work. Not only because I have never been able to answer with certainty the question whether aesthetics is a domain of objective thought, but also because the painter at issue, in person and his painting– which I could never separate from his way of existing– is part of my personal history. Our friendship has been a silent communication that has lasted throughout the years despite sometimes long intervals of time and space that have kept us apart from each other, having lost the possibility of friendship as an ongoing face-to-face relationship. That communication had come into existence in the peaceful music of colours that filled the hours in which I used to pose for him. A magic at work, natural in an extraordinary way, used to displace me from my inner world to life as part of the work of the other. The excess that inevitably erupts into my language when I find myself in the position to speak of his paintings stems undoubtedly from that of his his art which is lived in me, always surrounded by the special aura of our friendship.

I was a figure in the painting he made for graduation, as he was finishing his studies in The Academy of Fine Arts in 1983. My experience as a model, which is limited to Ercüment Tarhan’s painting, had thus started with this, his final work for school. This experience of being the object of the artist’s gaze has repeated itself through time and provided me, in turn, with several occasions to watch him paint. As the object of the gaze I was also always more than mere object, for he always included me in the process of creation, eliciting from me, the movement, the pose, always engaging in dialogue about the creative event bursting forth on the canvas. Meanwhile, I witnessed him paint a painting of self-erasure –a certain retreat of the ego through the brush and the colour, giving rise to the appearance of a vision in every point of the canvas. He kept working, carrying an endless debate with his own silence and he always met with what he had been looking for those days and nights, as if it had been brought into being by a miracle.

I was quite young, only sixteen when I first met Ercüment Tarhan. I had written a few poems and even had the audacity to translate into Turkish some poets such as Baudleaire, Rimbaud and Apollinaire (which I never published). I use to live in my own world in the midst of friends from the Acamedy who were a few years older than me. Ercüment Tarhan was certainly the most special friend I had at that time. Inquiring into the reasons that made his presence so special for me, as much as for other people, I see that they lay in his being free of prejucides of any sort. He refused to categorize people according to age, sex, social status, class etc. He was open, in both his person and in his art to welcome the alterity of the other without reducing or distorting it. In short, he was able to let the other… be. His freeing open proximity gave me the space to enter into the world of painting, by enabling me to relate differently to my own deep anxieties. Thinking retrospectively, I believe that hospitality was the trait that unified his character. “I appreciate my father” he told me the other day when he was painting me once again after a long time. For his father had never questioned his interest in reading or his decision to study painting. Back in Iğdır where he spent his childhood, he was the only reader of The Milliyet Journal of Art. Iğdır’s only bookshop received only four copies of it and sent back the remaining three every month. As soon as he had finished high school he came to Istanbul and spent several years in The Academy, from which he graduated with the highest grades. He always knew and accepted, from the very beginning, the enormous price he was going to pay for choosing to exist as a painter in Turkey. An existence that is centred in nothing else, strives to be nothing less than a painter, an acceptance of this as if, in some ways one does not really exist in this world. A life of passion beyond passion, lived as a response to the appeal of the invisible in the visible, as a responsibility felt in touching the flesh of the world, as a spiritual experience that could release his soul from all the burdens of daily existence if the painting goes well and frustrate him deeply when it does not. The spirit that incarnates in his painting promises only finitude to the gaze that touches it. Perhaps there is also the call to leave the present state of affairs in order to go for a journey, in the fascination of a face, meeting the future in its lines, uncovering a forgotten world…
Merleau-Ponty could not make his description of the perception of the world fit into an object-subject ontology. In his chapter on “Sensing” (Le Sentir) of The Phenomenology of Perception (1945) he cannot prevent himself from saying: “So, if I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that one perceives in me, and not that I perceive.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, tr., by Colin Smith, London: Routledge Humanities Press, 1992, p.215. The sentence in French is as follows: “De sorte que, si je voulais traduire exactement l’expérience perceptive, je devrais dire qu’on perçoit en moi et non pas que je perçois.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception,Gallimard, 1945, p.249.
What is at stake here is the very givenness of perception in an atmosphere of (impersonal) generality: the fact that at the deepest level of the perception of a colour, sensation has become nothing else than a vibration in my existence. Ercüment Tarhan’s paintings confirm that a life of perception is the primary contact with the world, which the world of ordinary objects makes us forget. And finally, it is very significant for me that in his work this primary contact with the world is related to the female flesh. Put in Merleau-Ponty’s terms again, sexuality is not only a part of our being-in-the-world; our being-in-the-world is wholly sexual, just like it is wholly spatial and temporal… Existence as sexual and in sexual difference seen in Ercüment Tarhan’s art, is unknown to the popular culture for which sexuality is a mere object of consumption. Sexuality of our existence as it is depicted by Ercüment Tarhan penetrates the flesh through and through and is inscribed in there as an enigma. In his paintings the faces of women are signified as freed from all their identities and ties of belonging as if no real situation could take their transcendence away from them. They express liberation, compassion and the possibility of peace. Ercüment Tarhan paints women, at least for the most part. Nevertheless, what interests him in women is not their worldy existence or their appeal to the male gaze, but rather a possibility in their different relationships to the world. In their very intimacy, they remain strangers, their distant and yet kind gaze never condemns but sheds light into the future .
No one can really give an explanation of their gazing at the emptiness in picturing the future, of their intercourse with the sky, of their standing in front of the curtains as they really are, of their departures in leaving everything behind, of their tired eroticism, of the unnameability of their desires as reflected in the mirrors that hide their faces. In fact, the experience of being face-to-face with them can never be traced or explained by returning to its memory, for the original experience has never been lived. Our gaze cannot appropriate these women, and they invite the gaze to a trip from which there is no guarantee of return. Ercüment Tarhan patiently seeks the impossible; that which is friendship and solitude and all at once a breathless effort and peace: he depicts the moment in which the face interrupts the temporality of the painting.