In Memoriam | Yüksel Arslan ( 1933-2017)

Mavi Boncuk | Yüksel Arslan[1] (b. July 27,1933, Eyup, Istanbul, Turkey- d. April 20, 2017 Paris, Croix Saint-Simon Hospital, France)

Image: Yüksel Arslan, “L’Homme XXVI: Hallucinations, Arture 385” [2] (detail), 1988. Handmade pigments and ink on paper, 13 1/4 x 10 3/4 inches. Photo by Cengiz Tacer.


Until recently, Turkish artist Yüksel Arslan remained almost unknown to a broader public. In 1962, he left his homeland and went to live in Paris where he has worked ever since on a visual oeuvre by and through the reception of cultural, sociological, philo­sophical and artistic literature in his apartment. 


Yüksel Arslan (b. 1933, Istanbul, Turkey) has often been associated with the loosely-structured surrealist movement in Turkey and was affiliated with the intellectual circles of 1960s Paris that included Jean-Paul Sarte, André Breton, and Jean Dubuffet. For the past 60 years, Arslan has been mining the depths of the unconscious mind, bringing together Western and Eastern aesthetics and philosophy in finely wrought works that he calls Artures . His Artures work on paper using a unique technique with special paints and being marked by an expressiveness that Eugène Delacroix has already looked upon as a typical characteristic of the orient. Thematically, the work is permeated by a confrontation with the relationship between thought and mysticism, between myth, science, and visual arts, and the philosophical, literary and musical currents which might be described as the foundation of Western thought, in the awareness that the knowledge anchored here could hardly have arisen without the experience of other peoples and cultures.

Serial in format, the hundreds of drawings he has produced deal with subjects as varied as schizophrenia and the eroticism of de Sade, Bataille, and Artaud, as well as visual interpretations of artists, poets, writers, scientists, musicians, and philosophers that have influenced his thinking. Arslan’s working process includes the use of self-made and antique tools and the production of his own colors using ancient methods of combining raw pigments with his own saliva, blood, urine, and other organic materials like honey, earth, and egg whites. 

Arslan does not use classical paints, but mixes pigments with various vegetable extracts, bodily fluids, other natural elements (petals, grass etc.), and additional substances such as oil, coal and stones. This process of production is an important part of the pictorial invention process, and does not represent any separate preparation of the actual artistic work. In Arslan’s opinion painting, since the dawn of modern art, has degenerated into a medium whose origins numerous artists have increasingly neglected. Like Jean Dubuffet, the artist seeks to throw off the ballast of today in order to bring out what – before the beginning of a culture – constituted the “essence”. It is only the path via what has superficially been transcended by culture, but in reality only distorted, that allows Arslan to rediscover the pristine, which he then consistently venerates, for example procreation and sexuality. As he occupies himself with modern and ancient languages, history, philosophy, music and ancient cultures, he is familiar with the cultural “ballast”. Arslan has come to recognize that much of this does not reflect the essence of man. He senses similarities of the vernacular in the origins of cultures all over the world.

Arslan’s Artures are created in groups that unite not only socially relevant themes and questions, but also thematize the experiences that relate to his own life story. The three cycles with the titles L’Homme I – III, Le Capital are general in their approach, while the two series Influances I & II stand for the artist’s occupation with personalities and their achievements, which are not only relevant to his approach but also emphasize his great affinity to literature and music. In this sense he has cre­ated works relating to, among others, Johann Sebastian Bach, Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, René Descartes, Sigmund Freud and Franz Kafka. 

From this point onward Arslan's style becomes less experimental and his fixations ever more pronounced. Much of the 1970s was devoted to producing didactic illustrations of Marx's Capital, images chockablock with fat, grasping capitalists and lumpen factory workers. Other cycles of Artures include pseudoscientific drawings of eyes, testicles, breasts and penises; various creatures copulating and hybrids of men and insects; dalliances with mysticism; and portraits of artistic and philosophical heroes including Kant, Beckett, Cage and Brecht (in the series "Influences" from the 1980s and the 2000s). Over time, pictorial complexity is abandoned in favor of more diagrammatic treatments.






[1] 

Yüksel Arslan (1933-2017) studied Art History at Istanbul University but discontinued his studies to practice painting more intensely. In 1962, invited by André Breton and art dealer Raymond Cordier, he settled to Paris, where he created the Homunculus-cucus-palus, and the Planus-phallus-micrococus series. There, he became part of intellectual circles and started to develop a unique body of artistic work driven by cultural, sociological, philosophical, and artistic writings. Also in Paris, he opened his first solo show a year after he moved. Arslan, combining the word “art” with the “ure” suffix in French (like in “peinture” or “écriture”) to create the word “arture”, a series which he painted these with plants, herbs, stones, soil, and even blood and urine. He concentrated his reading on works by Marx and Engels, as well as Nietzsche and Freud, he completed his series which involved The Capital (1967) drawings. This was the first of his series which have been compiled in books, followed in the 1980’s by Influences, Auto-Artures, and  Human. Apart from Paris, his works were exhibited in various French cities, among them Sarcelles, Rennes and Nice, as well as at the Vienna Modern Arts Museum and the Prague National Gallery. The final volume of Human was published in 1999. 

He started painting his environment: flowers, glasses, stones, bricks, coals and soap pieces in his childhood. He studied Art History at Istanbul University but discontinued his study to practice painting on his own time. Arslan had his first solo exhibition at the Maya Gallery in 1955. In 1961, he was invited to Paris to by Andre Breton and the art dealer Raymond Cordier, and he moved to Paris. During his stay in Paris, he produced the "Homunculus-cucus-palus", "Planus-phallus-micrococus" series.  He kept working on his “Artune” series in 1969 using the ancient methods of combining raw pigments with earth, oil, his blood, urine, saliva, and natural dyeing. In 1962 he had his third solo exhibition beside Raymond Cordier. It was followed by “Arture” series in Copenhagen and Berlin. After he exhibited 22 paintings in Frankfurt, Arslan went back to Paris and opened another “Arture” exhibition. In 1967 he came to Turkey and had his exhibitions in Ankara and Istanbul. In the same year he began painting the series of “Capital” (1967) having been inspired by the writings of Karl Marx. It was published in Paris in 1975. One of Arslan’s recent exhibitions was held at the Drawing Centre in New York, called "Visual Interpretations" curated by Brett Littman in 2008. Arslan′s works were also included in the "Modern and Beyond: 1950-2000" exhibition at Santral Istanbul in 2007-2008. He was inspired by the writings of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. Arslan brought together the Western and Eastern traditions and deals with various subjects like psychology, erotism and the subconscious. It is possible to see the influence of Eastern miniatures and Anatolian folklore such as the Karagöz and Hacivat (the lead characters of the traditional Turkish shadow play) in his works. Arslan’s most famous series besides the above mentioned ones are "Influences", "Autoartures", "L’Homme" and "Nouvelles Influences". Arslan currently lives and works in Paris.

Reference:  artnet.com; arkitera.com.tr; thy.com; edebiyatsanat.com; Sotheby’s London Contemporary Art Turkish, 4 March 2009 (London 2009), p. 79 and 99.

[2] In the series Autoartures, Arslan deals exclu­sively with autobiographical events: memories relating to his family and his background – the con­frontation with his own pristinity.

The term “pristinity” is often associated with “myth”. Many works, both in their structure and in their use of text and pictures, resemble scientific tables and taxonomies at first, for example Arture 439, L’Homme 80 (1992), Arture 463, L’Homme 104: Schizophrénies (1996) or Arture 467, L’Homme 108: Schizophrénies (1996). It is from this confrontation that, for the artist, the ongoing actuality of archetypes and myths is derived: they are forms of pristine classificatory images that show man­kind still in harmony with nature. These ideas are based on something other than a sensibility that romanticizes a yearning for nature. What Arslan is aiming at is the pristine unity in the cycle of creation, such as for example in Arture 362, L’Homme III (1986) and Arture 378, L’Homme XIX: Course de spermatozoids (1987). This unity is symbolized for example in the image of man, beast and landscape. “Being an animal” is in his opinion being placed by fate in the rhythm of birth, ex­istence and death, and transferred from the coincidentally individual into the sphere of the general. Thus for Arslan the animal is often the inwardly sought-after partner of the human being, the en­counters are not hostile, but natural phenomena like the wind, thunderstorms, lightning strikes, flames and electrical discharge. In line with this understanding, he is interested by the particulari­ties of the landscape, less in the topographic sense than as the expression of hidden forces. At the same time they appear as pristine codes that express a reciprocal relationship between all earthly occurrences. For Arslan, the pristine is the as-yet-undivided.


Not just since Claude Lévi-Strauss have we known that myth represents an ordering structure sui generis, and thus in no sense a pre-scientific stage of development on the historic path to any theo­retical conceptuality. Myth is seen as a form of explication of the world in general, an explication in which, by analogy, everything is linked to everything else, and in accordance with which things are no mere lifeless objects, but integrated parts of a comprehensive order, and as such, represent particular qualities in each instance. Contrasted with myth, rational and functional thought neces­sarily means critique of myth, and ultimately brings about the dissolution of a thus represented whole. Immediate experience is replaced by the scientific principle of individuation and classifica­tion, or: causality rather than interpretation. By way of example, his works relating to gesture, schizophrenia or hallucinations can be mentioned: Arture 381, L’Homme XXII: Névrotiques (1988) and Arture 385, L’Homme XXVI: Hallucinations (1988). For all the inevitable abbreviation of the subject matter, this formula nevertheless shows that scientific insight is always coupled with a certain feeling of loss. Arslan makes this aspect clear. In the process, he shows that pristinity can only exist from the point of view of progress: individuation is an empty word without the concept of the whole. In correlations of this kind, then, there appears something that belongs to the past, something that has been superseded. Thus the mutual conditionality of pristinity and progress finds, so to speak, a graphic reflection in the dialectic of modernity’s break with tradition.