The dimensions of content in Ercüment Tarhan’s figurative painting seem to verify the harmonic relationship between nature and humankind as the outcome of an inquiry by means of artistic expression. Social processes have been changing this harmonic relationship and the value standards that are extended from artistic sensitivity to the plane of painting have determined the main conceptions that are particular to various historical eras.

Interpretations of figure particular to our age have both brought analyses of form in the face of deformation due to technological change and have provided a space for the expression of the artist’s inner psychic tension. The only fact that hasn’t changed, regardless of artistic tendencies, is the fact that human beings are part of nature. In Ercüment Tarhan’s art, this fact is brought forth as a moderate dimension of the traditional quest for reconciliation between natural environment and humankind; however, figurative relations also convey tendencies for the rejection of such a reconciliation usually symbolized as a small forest or an edge from a forest.

Ercüment Tarhan exemplifies the figurative scale that has arisen after modernism and that has developed into the re-investigation of classical real dimensions with his thematic focus on alienation from nature. The condition of modernity cannot solely be a formalist show due to a schism of style. The potential originality that stimulates courage for venture can be perceived at different levels. If one can sense the opposing movements of a contemporary sensitivity in the figurative style of a soft and a well-behaved art that rests its back on nature, these can be counted as indicators of a search for style that tries to guarantee an artistic engagement facing the future.

Sezer TANSUĞ
From Ercüment Tarhan’s exhibition catalogue,
6-30 October, 1992, Teşvikiye Art Gallery, İstanbul.
Translation by Ayşe Durakbaşa