Yüksel Arslan, "Arture 130A", 1968
55th Venice Biennale, 2013
The Encyclopedic Palace. Central exhibition features Yuksel Arslan
Artistic director: Massimiliano Gioni.
Mavi Boncuk |
A Turkish artist with links to the Surrealist movement, Yüksel Arslan (born in 1933 in Istanbul) has lived in Paris since 1962. For the last 60 years he has been producing artworks based on his studies of Eastern and Western writings on history, philosophy, sociology, music and art. Until recently, he was little known outside of his native Turkey. The drawings made before and just after Arslan's move to Paris show the artist negotiating between conflicting pictorial and cultural traditions and are the most stimulating of the works on view. Arture 123, Jésus, Mohamet et la politique (Jesus, Mohammed and Politics), 1968, for example, portrays an inconclusive encounter between the two religious figures. In Arture 105, Contrearture (1966), a herd of cattle walks toward a swarm of menlike creatures with tentacle heads approaching from the opposite direction. A giant's leg intrudes into the picture and a rat chews on a frame drawn around the scene. The main action is rendered as a frieze in a traditional Turkish style, without linear perspective, while the rat and the human hand shown pulling on its tail are depicted in a classical Western fashion.
Photo: Yüksel Arslan: Arture 416, Man 57: General Paralysis, 1990, mixed mediums on paper, 153⁄8 by 133⁄4 inches; at Kunsthalle Zurich.
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. Arslan has no qualms about examining his unconscious and could get points for stamina, but when his works are seen en masse, the depths plumbed seem pretty shallow.
Yüksel Arslan, studied at the History of Art Institute of the Istanbul University. In 1961 he settled to Paris, where he opened his first solo show a year later. Instead of giving different titles to his works, he combined the word “art” with the “ure” suffix in French (like in “peinture” or “écriture”) to create the word “arture” and painted his “artures” by plants, herbs, stone, soil, and at times even blood and urine. In 1964, Arslan’s “artures” were included in the exhibition entitled “The Origins, History and Relationships of Surrealism” organized by the Galerie Charpentier, and viewed today as one of the most important exhibitions of the history of Surrealism. On the eve of 1968, he came to Turkey where he stayed for two years and opened exhibitions. Returning to Paris in 1969, he concentrated his reading on works by Marx and Engels and in 1975, he completed his series which involved “The Capital” drawings.This was the first of his series that are compiled in books, followed in the 1980’s by the “Influences”, the “Auto-Artures” and the “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 the “Human” was published in 1999. Arslan, considering this series as his “will”, continues working on it at his studio in Paris.