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ON TAYYAR ERENS’S NUDE DRAWINGS
Concerning linearity, or the harmony of line purged of colour, the
crowning words were spoken by the Neoclassical masters of the last
century. The first name to spring to mind is without doubt that of one of
the leaders of that movement, Ingres.
According to him, drawing-or perhaps I should say ‘design’; for in both
French and Turkish one word refers to both- embodies both the honour and
the fruitfulness of art; and he said that in order to do it justice,
drawing / desing needs to be considered on a ‘musical’level. Here it is
clear that he was interpreting musicality according to Classical standarts
of taste. It hardly needs mentioning that as every period has a standart
of ‘musicality’ based on its own taste and aesthetic norms, so drawing,
too, must of necessity be interpreted according to these standards.
Artists of the Classical or Neoclassical period, who took as their
standart the objective proportions and relationships of form found in
nature, maintaned that drawing should be handled with truthfulness and
frankness which would reflect those proportions and relationships. On the
other hand the artists of the Baroque and Romantic periods, for example,
dispensed with clarity of line in favour of chiaroscuro. Yet in their
works,too, it is not difficult to perceive in the rest of the picture the
existence of a construction, a skeleton characteristics of architecture,
which embraces and supports all the forms in the composition.
That all being the case, hormony of line, be it explicit or implicit, may be defined
as a search for ‘musicality’ dominating the picture and embracing the
whole of the composition. Of course, what I have been refering to is a
harmony in the pictorial or visual sense. But ‘drawing’ has another
dictionary definition, refering to another, autonomous area. I mean a type
of picture executed or represented as ‘a drawing’ per se. Most artists are
reluctant to view this area as something autonomous. For them, a drawing
is somewhat akin to an artist’s dirty linen. Each one is merely a skecth,
a study or a warm-up exercise. In order to be perceived as works of art in
themselves, above all it is necessary for drawings to have been made in
order to create a drawing per se well, nobody in the history of art has
ever ascended to the throne of artistry by making only drawings per se. Some painters have also produced
drawings. But there again, the place of drawing among these artists varies
from individual to individual. Some of them see drawing as a kind of
representation, others carry this form beyond the limits of
representation. We may consider, for instance, Matisse, Picasso, Klee or
Degas as belonging to this second category. In Turkey the first names that
come to mind are Hoca Ali Rýza or Fikret Mualla.
Tayyar Eren, too, a self-taught artist with a strong personality, is one
of those who have consciously and willingly fallen in love with drawing;
and he is one of those who consider drawing to be primary branch of art,
an autonomous area. It is this area which he has exploited,especially in
the last few years, by directing his works towards nude studies. Paul Klee
reffered to the naked human body as a perferct subject. Furthermore, a
veritable army of artists, both older and newer than Klee, have embraced
drawings as the most appropriate tecnique for portraying the naked human
body. The proportions and spatial relationships of the parts that make up
the human body can perhaps most successfully be shown in drawing; for
line, which defines the boundaries of form, has a prime role in
establishing the relationship between the whole and the parts.
Tayyar Eren is aware of this fact, and in his nude studies he tries to
emphasize the clarifying, defining function of line. Whether on an
absolute level, or within a lightly coloured and moulded context of
impression, his studies contain the curved line of womens’ bodies in
various kinds of movement. In these drawings, even if attempts at
abstraction do occasionally within itself, but also it thereby manifests
an acceleration of movement stemming from the model. For Tayyar Eren, what
is important is both this accelaration of movement and also the visual quality or plasticity of
the drawing. In this sense the nude ceases to be the object of interest of
a run-of-the mill or tired out studio work, and becomes in itself an
independent art form. In any case, Tayyar Eren does not approach this
subject as a working disciple to develop his hand by repetitive practice.
If he had not already attained such discipline, we would not be able to
view his nýde drawings in the way we do-as a series of works which have
long since passed that point.
From close acquaintance I know that in order to acquire this transcendence
Tayyer Eren underwent a liberal studio training; showed respect for, and
learnt from, the masters around him; left no stone unturned in his search
for knowledge; and was most meticulous in choosing art as his firm
vocation.
The nude drawings by Tayyar Eren which we are now looking at fulfill all
expectations regarding his fundamental mastery of the functional power of
line, and also justify the hopes we had for his future.
by
KAYA ÖZSEZGÝN
The human
figure has always been central to painting and sculpture, as art has
pondered the human condition. Two strands have interwined in this long
meditation, the real and the ideal, what we are and what we would be. The
Greeks, so alert to philosophical enquiry, sought in their statuary ideal
form, the perfected figure. Roman sculptors, celebrating pragmatic
conquerors and civic dignities, strove more to express the particular man,
the actual woman. It is the difference between the Venus de Milo and the
superb statuary portraiture at Aphrodisias, and, later, in the Nothern
European tradition, between Ingres' "Bather of Valpinçon" and Van Gogh's
convicts stumbling in an unrelenting circle round a prison yard. What each
artist contemplates is human potentiality, our loss and our gain, all this
is within us. In the Christian tradition, as both West and East perceived
it, these things could come together fully in the figure of the crucified
Christ, the God who suffers as man, and in Mary, idealized as virgin,
smiling as mother, holding in her lap the baby who is God.
How in
today's art, with its uncetainty as to value and its often acute
consciousness of suffering, can such a conjunction of real and ideal be
realized? Pursuit of the ideal has become part of the move, through
impressionism and expressionism, towards abstraction, reducing both figure
and landscape to its underlying structures in colour and in form. The
pursuit of the form within the form tends always to end in a preoccupation
with paint itself-the medium becomes subject. Picasso, in his figure
painting, disintegrates or manipulates the human form in order still to
investigate it and to arrive thereby at what we are. But the British
artist Frank Auerbach, while preoccupied by figure, seems to merge it into
an overall painted surface, to make one thing - and that a painted thing -
form all things. With Francis Bacon the figure is distinct, yet made one
with the entire atmosphere of the picture surface, instinct with disgust
and horror at what we are. The paint screams and the idealizing instinct
within reduction and abstraction is controverted by an unremitting,
decaying moral perception, a response to history as Bacon perceives it.
Where within
such varied responses can we locate the particular insights of the
contemporary Turkish figure painter Tayyar Eren? His figures, both men and
women, are abstracted, almost imperceptibly elongated human forms, seated,
or in action or contortion. Tey centre the pictorial space, respond to and
contrast with its careful painted tones, flesh upon terra cotta, greys upon blue,
ochre and yellow flooding behind a mute imploring body, the brown stain of
blood soaked from a twisted, spawling figure, black line upon untouched
paper. Even though they are reduced from the real, distilled memories of
the drawn figure, they are uncannily actual. Here is a woman, as bodily as
the squeezed clay of a fertility goddess. Here is a man gunned down. And
there another, his body shaped by suffering, aspiration, or appeal. These
figures emerge and take shape form the worlds in which we daily move, to
become our myths, touching our limits and horizons. And so they affirm in
the one pictorial movement what is, what is endured and what might be, the
real and the ideal. And, by that, as all myth does, they affirm our
humanity, if not to serenity, at least to dignity and endurance. There is
nothing modish here, only a dedication to releasing meaning from the forms
we inhabit. If we look for a familiar anchor to stabilize our sense of
Eren's distinctive work, the statues and drawings of the Swiss artist
Giacometti might be helpful. But, in truth, whether we see his figures in
succession on a gallery wall, as recentyl at the Takýantika Gallery in
Ankara, or each singly, as itself an object of contemplation and
realization, they so express themselves as to need no anchor. This is
substantial painting, substantial vision.
by
RONALD TAMPLIN
TAYYAR EREN and NUDE,AGAIN NUDE and NUDES
Tayyar Eren has been so integrated with the "nude"s, the main theme of his
recent works, that whenever
I think of him, his nudes come to my mind first. After long years of
working of nude drawings, with the deformation and interpretation peculiar
to him, the nudes, identitical with the artist have emerged.
These present the beholder the simple state of the body freed form
details, making it more
striking with the emotionalism and expressionism arising from the
deformation. When that rationalist dynamism
is reflected in the painting differences among the surfaces are created
through dark and light stains.
Although the drawings remain to be the foundation stones of the
substructure, they appear in a completely different dimension when
transferred on to the canvas. Oil painting is nothing but reaching to a
happy
end for Tayyar Eren who seeks the graphics of the inner world of the nudes
in the rhythm of thelines.
Thus, getting rid of all their burden, the drawings formed with agile
lines turn into free stains in which emotionalism comes to the foreground
and which give the taste of abstract painting. Tayyar Eren is a man who
never makes any concessions in his art. His paintings, created without any
commercial thoughts,
are merely the expression of his inner realities. He, by using dramatic
expressions, reflects his emotionalism
and inner dynamism to the beholder. When the silence hidden behind the
lines is transformed into painting, it creates, the power and effect of
polyphonic music.
25th January 2000
by LUTFU GUNAY(Artist)
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