Plato, in The Feast, one of his Dialoques, describes love as “giving birth to beauty in accord with soul and flesh”. “All human beings have the potential capacity to produce in accord with soul and flesh. When we arrive at a certain age, our nutare wants to give birth. This delivery does not heppen in a disgusting way, it happens in beauty. (…) A being loaded with a potentiality to create, when (s)he comes closer to beauty. (s)he relaxes, opens up, pours over with pleasure, gives birth and multiplies in number. If (s)he meets ugliness, on the contrary, (s)he is invaded by melancholy, feels obstructed, halters, shrinks; and instead of giving birth, worries about carrying the load within. That is why a being swelling with essence and fecundity attempts with utmost force to reach, anything beautify to get released from the unbearable pangs of giving birth. Then, Socrates, Love is not what you think, it is not the love of beauty.
What is it then?
It is the love of giving birth, the love of creating in beauty.
Okey, let’s say so.
You know what is in a garden. A garden is a site where you till the ground, you order and clean; it is a special site where you plant grass, flowers, trees and which you see to with great care. A garden is a place of memories. It is acquaintance and knowledge. A garden is introvert closure, escape and protection.
A garden is not outdoors, it is a special site covered by the sky, it is like home, an inner world.
Garden is fear and defense. Garden is a shell. It implies the secure freedom of a turtle that carries its shelter on its back. Garden is hiding. It is the most exicting children’s game; “hide and seek”. Garden is a place where you oversee and control congregation and growth.
Garden is spirit, reticence and stillness; whereas nature is anima, movement and chaos.
In this sense, it is more convenient to call the portions of ground, in Tarhan’s paintings, where flowers pots, the underneath of a tree, or the shade of a climbing plant are depicted,
“garden” rather than “nature”. And “garden” implies “interiors”. Nostalgia, emotion and loneliness. In this framework, the “interiors” depicted in Tarhan’s paintings as “garden” , although slightly depressive but never gloomy – yet dense, extends out of the canvas like a naive, sensitive hand.
Ercüment Tarhan’s art can be periodized as “the time of copper” and “the time of tulle” – which I first named as a joke and then adopted it as metaphors that correspond to the real nature of his paintings. “The time of copper” is named after the copper objects that the artist painted frequently at the time; however, it signifies – It is exactly so, it cannot be otherwise. Why is it the love of giving birth, because giving birth takes one to eternity, makes the mortal immortal…”

Plato wrote these lines hundreds of years before the science called psychology was established with that name. And here, he treated art not as an easthetic value but as an outcome of an existential condition, in a sense.
The concerns related to form in Ercüment Tarhan’s paintings can be considered as means to express the contents of life experience, especially love. We can read in these paintings, lines of a great poem by a person whose main life-concern is “love”.

Is Tarhan an artist of nature? Or is he merely an artist with a male gaze who sees and paints women in slightly erotic postures?
No, he is not an artist who depicts nature… Neither is nature his main concern… Nature is only a replacement. And even more, nature does not exist in his art, in the way it is told in the writings about Ercüment Tarhan.
Nature is a boundless, wild, open space where ruthless games are played and where one can get lost, for it is an area of immensity, and of chaos, with its own special rules and language, where fright and courage, decisive steps and an urge for quest take over oneself at the same time. However, in Tarhan’s paintings, it is not nature but rather pieces of nature depicted as “gardens” that are in the fore front. And a garden tells us totally different things.

Garden as a specified, private site
A garden is a humane site. It is enclosed and preserved. It has fences, walls, i.e. it is bounded around. Something different, set apart.
We see “rationality” in Tarhan’s paintings in this period up to the end of 1980’s. This period is marked by the painters’s consistent trial with the visual possibilities within the limits approved by the ratio, whereby the objects and beings are things that are looked at, which are depicted with an attempt to penetrate into the interior, however with a style that still leaves the looker (painter) at a distance. In the ‘90s, the precision in the depiction of objects and beings becomes more and more obscure and there is the expression of an intermixture of reality and dream by visiul ambiguity in these paintings. The boundaries are not so well-defined and the painter has started looking at the objects and beings with his inner-eye rather than his external-eye.

So in this “period of tulle”, when the artist can be named a romantic, existence is shaped in a new form. It is not depicted as it is or as it appears, but it is reflected upon the canvas, adorned with feelings and thoughts, in the way the artist has constructed in his mind with his own point of view. The themes of “garden” and “woman” become more marked in this period.
The tulle that the artist has placed between himself and the external world is stretched over the canvas; this is a voluntarily woven net and is good for putting a distance between himself and the beings while at the same time it enables him to trickle into them by the means of this distance.
The color and light stop all at once just like the fantasy dreams of a man who wants to fall in love and make love with a woman who does not give her heart to him. A sorrowful green, an outrageous yellow, the red of passion, tries desperately to touch inside the beings and install itself in their world.
When we try to decode Ercüment Tarhan’s art in this way, and understand how he wants to play with life – not in the sense of trickery, cunning plans or artifice, but with a motive to engaging in a childish game – it does not make sense to call his nude women erotic. It would be more appropriate to name this nudity a wish for “the dispossession of masks” rather than calling it “eroticism”.

Life as a game
In Tarhan’s paintings, embracing life as a game and wanting to be part of that game, the attempt to know and especially to comprehend its meaning comes out in the disguise of a “game” before us.
Playing games is the ability not to feel revenge in the face of all kinds of weariness, getting bored and being frustrated and starting again and again with the naiveness of a child.
Playing a game is changing roles and playing the role of a other. It is modesty and a voluntary wish to know and understand. It is getting interested in “exchange” without cutting off from what is humane.

Playing a game is instructive because it is not one-sided; it is something accomplished together. It is in a sense a call- “Do not let me alone”, “accept me”. This is a call indeed, a call for dialogue. While he glorifies “we” rather than “I”, he declares that he has given himself to this deed and the beauty is there, because he offers up even what he had wanted to get. This is simultaneously the fine philosophical point where Ercüment Tarhan transcends mysticism and the model of human relationship imposed by closed communities is transposed from an ethical perspective. Getting and giving, expecting and hoping are expressed in an elegant form here.
Ercüment Tarhan’s elegance also differentiates him from the values of the masculine world.
Virginia Woolf repeats Coleridge’s view that a genius mind should be androgynous in “A Room of One’s Own”. In this book, which deals with the issues of creativity and especially women’s creativity, Woolf discusses that a purely masculine mind or a purely feminine mind cannot be creative; if a masculine mind is dominant in a man’s mind or a feminine mind is dominant in a woman’s mind, then the spritual cooperation is disconcerted. She defends that creativity will benefit from the activation of an opposite sexual identity in a man’s or a woman’s mind. In Tarhan’s paintings it is noticeable that the feminine mind is as active as the masculine mind.

Poetry – time – space
This subtitle could have been shortened to “time and space”… However, if we do not attach – not only the poetic – but poetry as well – to the work of time and space in Tarhan’s paintings, we can then say that the time is arrested.
…
Why should one chain life, just like a horse-thief
That ties a horse on its feet! You and I
What haven’t we given to each other while we lived.
Immortality is attempting to arrest the life
Just like freezing a film on one image.
…
This is an arrest similar to the one described in Andrey Voznesenski’s lines above…
The stillness in the artist’s paintings aggravates this feeling of arrest, which is shaken by poetry only. Poetry imposes itself as an element that guarantees movement and flow.

It is this intervention that makes us aware of poetry. It is this poetry that constructs the essence of his art. Because it is our essence, our existence, alienation, which waits for us, that the essence of art captures at a certain moment and presents at a certain place. It is our inner poem.
This inner poem beckons us to listen to it and relax. Time has been arrested somehow, indeed, but this is not done to stop the images and freeze a certain image. Neither has “beauty” been turned into an object of watching. It is for the sake of knowing oneself and reflecting on one’s own consciousness, and starting the “dialogue”.
This world which talks to itself has one great wish: Dialogue…
This longing for dialoque evident in his art leads us to ask new questions about the time. Which dimension, history or future? And this has of course one single answer. A past to which one can relate by means of remembering… And the container that stores the cold waters of space and time overturns on top of us…
Our inner gardens get pruned with th artist’s profound, simple and pale but challenging style.

In his back yard, a man with his delicate voice, reads poetry under the bushes, basking in the light beams that come through the green.