without title Painting

„I have no idea, no motive nor theme. I start working and the picture develops out of itself. Thus the pictures have no names or titles. I merely take note of the fact that the pictures confront themselves with RED.” This is how Ercan Arslan described to me the genesis of his pictures. He uses a multi-layer technique with oil on cardboard or canvas. The picture grows layer by layer to his final dimension over a period of several months, when the finished picture is born. Again and again Red in its various spectrums moves into the foreground of the picture. In this process the other colours are not lost; in fact, they appear to give life to the fire, the variations of RED. The slowly evolving figures, appearing at times like ecstatic dancers from a different dimension or like archaic gods, remind us of William Blake or H.R. Giger. In the context of the whole picture, the figurative elements merge with the colour spectrums forming an impressive work at the borderline areas of life: pain, pleasure, desire, death, fire, eros and thannatos united in free play. These are the dark gods celebrating or pausing in meditative motionlessness. These are the shadow realms, the knowledge and experience of which assist us to develop our spiritual consciousness; to the spectator, however, the pictures appear dark only at first sight. “It is the darkness that gives birth to light.” (Goethe) Sometimes the threshold of pain appears to have been overstepped, the dancing horned figure in the undertow of a RED appearing to explode into the spectator’s field of vision, the phallic-apostolic beings inspiring one to meditate, the borderline between, animal, man and gods disintegrating. After our initial contact the question arose within me: how can such a young man grasp and work out the dimension of shadow and borderline areas so intensively. Perhaps the answer lies in his place of origin- an ancient and spiritual culture. Manfred D. Kuno