The empty space, ready to create a pictorial realm, is provoked by the unique nature of the canvas itself. Although the artist’s limits are enclosed by walls, the act of creation is boundless, and the artist is aware of this. The possibilities of this boundlessness on the relative canvas entice the artist to create. This artistic space is not a place for documentation, like in some photographs, but a space for creation. While photographs turn into faded memories, new, uncharted places and spaces are discovered in the pictorial realm. In this new universe, the found figure is immortalized because it has never existed, it has not been transferred from the world of the living onto the canvas.
It is useful to remember Nurettin Erkan’s thought, "The width of the canvas is the best place where I can express myself freely." Erkan follows the traces of the limitless possibilities that this vast emptiness offers, while also pushing his own boundaries within this limitless space.
The figure on Erkan's canvas does not know death, because it has never lived. The unseen face of the visible corresponds to a corner of our world, an isolated place no one sees, or to the very heart of the crowd. It becomes a tangible ghost: The Canvas.
A line in a poem, "someone was flying," does not have the same meaning as Nurettin Erkan’s flying figures. For Erkan's figures, which defy gravity, we are uncertain about whether the right word is "did it fly, is it flying, or was it flying?" The figures ask us this question, yet it seems difficult to find an answer in the paintings. Time and space flow differently for each figure, and even when together, they constantly evolve into variable meanings.
“The infinite meaning created by humans, the imagination, coincides with the boundlessness of the canvas, and this is why I insist on the canvas. If there is a place I want to reach with the figure and the space, it is hidden on this canvas.”
In Erkan's paintings, the figure, sometimes under pressure, becomes ambiguous and begins to question its existence. The mode of existence that our age faces and its questioning seem to be the source of Erkan's paintings. In the universe of this questioning, the figures created gain life, much like the reflections that guide the artist's own life. Thus, a foreign figure created without questioning, along with its unique way of life, emerges in the painting. The human identity we know is, in a sense, fragmented, and a human story begins to form just on the edge of "the other." This human story is one of struggling in an age of nostalgia. It is our state within a hidden, subjective, and obscure world. A figure formed from the tension between different worlds becomes ambiguous, while simultaneously inhabiting a parched world.
The artist finds a constant opportunity for experimentation in a free space, which is also the different atmosphere created in the paintings. This is an atmosphere that, while seeming to oppose the truth, at times wants to be a mirror of the truth, and at the same time, rejects the truth, seeks another place, and presents this search as the purpose of existence.
Erkan’s figures embody an opaque yet rigid truth, expressed through a surreal method. With their ambiguity, they question the truth and open a door for the redefinition of everything.
Baroque weaving... entwined figures, continuity, movement... The intertwining of concepts like movement and stillness, limits and boundlessness. The artist’s closeness to the Baroque structure might be hidden in the concepts embodied by these figures. While these figures seem to defy gravity, they appear to carry each other by overlapping and repeating.
The figures give the impression of being trapped while revolving in the void for a long time. When looking at the figure clusters as a whole, a new ambiguity created by the compression can be observed. The new forms and structures created by repetition raise the question: What happens next?
In their confrontation with flight, these figures also reference the depiction of a new "place." To transport the story of figures that do not belong to any place to Earth and observe them from there seems to be a desire in these paintings. Gardens? Streets? Mountains? Seas? No, a DESERT! Everything will start again, their end will be nothing more than the beginning of something. Then another question arises: Where is the place? After a while, the question arises: Is it the painter or the figures who ask this question? The discovery of the figure is accompanied by the discovery of a pictorial world. A desire to explore the abstract and the real world images... The world is redefined, this time by the figures, named, and identified.
The search for identity and place, the search itself... Searching for the figure, searching for space, searching for identity, creating a method to search for the story... The search seems to be both the starting point, the developmental stage, and the ultimate outcome of Erkan’s paintings. The dance, posture, and occasional disappearance of these figures, who do not belong to any particular time, correspond to a world alternative in which everything is fluid and ambiguous. What these paintings convey is far beyond meaning. Even though they aim to create a narrative, what gives life to the figures is the artist's own story. A man will fly. He is flying, he has flown... and impatiently waiting to go beyond "he flew."