Ercüment Tarhan was born in 1956, in Iğdır, an eastern province of Turkey. He completed his primary school, secondary school and high school education in the same town. He had his training in the Atelier of Neşat Günal, in the State Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul. After he graduated, the artist took up painting as his vocation and made a name for himself in the Turkish art world. Ercüment Tarhan accomplished thirteen personal exhibitions, two of which were in England; he took part in many group exhibitions, in Turkey. Ercüment Tarhan is an artist who paints, mostly women figures in nature. Apart from his still-life type of paintings, “woman” is the main theme in his paintings. However, the woman figure is not the only focus in the composition, because the relationship between the objects of nature and human beings is articulated in harmony and balance. In all the works of the artist, there is a poetic view of this relationship. In his compositions, nature, object, and figures form a plastic harmony; all the elements, in a sense, lead their own adventure. Nature is neither depicted as dominating the human being, nor are the figures (women) positioned to oversee nature. The feeling at times spreads from a figure, from a movement, or from a color on to the composition. In his landscape paintings, the artist does not paint one single instance of a landscape but is in a way in search for the figures hidden somewhere; therefore, even the landscape without figures gives one an intense feeling of “figure”.

Towards the end of the 1980’s, figures in outdoor settings-rather than the earlier indoor compositions-became important in his works. In a number of works he painted apples, apple orchards and women relating in some way to ‘the apple’ in these gardens, with a dreamy expression. The spell of the gardens described in these paintings or the mysticism in this garden world is reinforced with the wonder that an apple implies. All the landscapes of the artist tell the story of a garden which was timeless and out of history. These might be gardens at any “moment” of history or one’s past.

This is not only nostalgia for the gardens of his home village and the intense realitionship with nature in his childhood. He seems to ask “how many deep layers does nostalgia have?” and declare in response: “Almost as deep as the misty green”. These gardens have stories that go back to the Classical Era of antiquity. However, even in this ‘timeless history’ the artist can ingencusly capture an immediate moment by directing the light skillfuly.

The artist lived in England in 1990-92, where he made the paintings of gardens, wild and untouched by the human hand, in opposition to the tilled, orderly gardens of England. In these paintings, the wind and the sky inspired by the Island geography and climate the paintings of Turner. On his return from England, apart from his usual compositions that depict “single women figures in nature”, he worked on compositions that illustrate woman-to- woman friendship, with implications of emotional attachment and eroticism between women. Women pursue their own activities and actions in solitude in the ‘single figure’ compositions. The artist catches a glimpse of these women in their natural state, while women go on with their own self engagement untrammelled. The artist is like a shy and cautious witness to the women’s solitary, nutaral and self-engaged world. In Tarhan’s later works with women in pairs, in triples and together with children, usually a woman with adventurous feeling in the garden looks out of the canvas and seems to wink at the artist’s escaping look. There is the charm of spontaneous instances of encounter in these paintings. There is also hidden eroticism in all of these depictions of a garden like in the earlier works in the “Women and Apple” series. This is not abserved at once but is sensed gradually after the painting is examined for a while. The naïve games of women with nature, a child-like smile on a woman’s face, a natural, spontaneous movement form the elements of this impression. Briefly, we see in Ercüment Tarhan’s paintings an emotional intensity coupled with this determined work in his life as an artist to produce a strong plastic effect on his canvas against a background of deep and dark colors. The artist spreads the expression on the composition as a whole with the skillful construction of the relationship between the figure, the color and the movement.
There is something in Ercüment Tarhan’s paintings that does not reveal itself all at once, the effect becomes intensified gradually. If one were to seek the source of this effect in another language medium, it would probably be poetry.