"My paintings are paintings of resistance. This is my first response but it is even more complex and wide. Thematizing the body is a philosophical position as well as a plastic-aesthetic alignment. The body has been undermined throughout time. They are active fields of resistance, deep assimilations, and of speechlessness."

"In his series of paintings titled "Body and Stone," Nurettin Erkan emphasizes contrasts such as internal-external, existence-non existence and impermanence-permanence as well as playing with the viewer's perception of reality by creating a feeling of timelessness, emptying the objects and bodies and intertwining a new web of meanings over their new compositions. The artist carries the bodies, which he has adorned with metaphoric symbols of his own, from a historical perspective up until our present day and exhibits how he emulates a different form and meaning by emptying the form with the body metaphor."

"It is not the surface beauty of pleasure and happiness, but a deeper beauty we cannot easily name. Perhaps it is a terrible beauty (as the Irish poet W. B. Yeats called it), a passing glimpse of courage and endurance, of resistance and survival."

Certainly a beauty, framed within the rectangle of a canvas, that is tinged with sorrow and melancholy. These paintings made me think yesterday of a short poem by the contemporary Indian woman poet, Gagan Gill, which she wrote in Hindi when she was a young woman in Delhi, and which I translate as follows:

      Sorrow in Happiness

    The sea has the sorrow of the wounded sea-turtle
    The tree-trunk has the sorrow of the dying root
    The storm has the sorrow of the man on the verge of defeat

    Who has the sorrow that lies in happiness?"

"Time stands still on Nurettin Erkan's canvases, and yet nothing is ever still, everything is in motion. The women, faceless, often without eyes and mouths, without the beauty of a woman's head of hair, without a gaze to return my gaze, are only in media res. The motionlessness is the pause of a freeze-frame. To look at fifteen or twenty of these paintings in succession in one room is to feel the powerful upsurge of temporality, of a process very much in process, of a movement that moves us and sweeps us along. The succession of pictures on a wall is the illusion of a series or a sequence of moments, but time is both a question and a questioning. We are in the present and the paintings are present before us, but their time is also not our time, they transport us gently but firmly into another time and another place. We enter their time and it becomes ours."

"In my opinion what confronts us here is a pictorial language that is guided by a desire to discover the basic structure that lies at the root of an infinite and invariable knowledge of the body."

"European painting has developed parallel to the racist history of whiteness. The figure of Jesus bathed in light is continuously depicted with bright white skin, blonde hair, and colored eyes. Angels are also white in these paintings. For this reason, European museums have not been able to keep racism out until now. They exist as tools of world assimilation." -Nurettin Erkan

"It is not the surface beauty of pleasure and happiness, but a deeper beauty we cannot easily name. Perhaps it is a terrible beauty (as the Irish poet W. B. Yeats called it), a passing glimpse of courage and endurance, of resistance and survival."

"In Botero, we see figures inflated like balloons that evoke a sense of lightness, while in Erkan, the figures are dense and heavy like lead. Their commonality lies in their fullness of questions, refusing to settle where you want them to."