Arture 546, Walseries, New Influences

Yüksel Arslan, who aimed to “paint by taking the paths that have never been taken before”, mostly produced paintings on paper by merging the techniques he encountered in an art book focusing on the prehistoric period with the paint recipes he prepared. Using materials such as raw pigments, herbs, tobacco, tea, urine, oil, blood, marrow, egg whites, honey, petrol, soil, and tile, the artist incorporates encyclopaedic illustrations, animal-human figures reminiscent of representations in anatomy and botany books, as well as structures and narratives that have symbolic historical and social significance. Arslan entitles his works “arture” by combining the word art with the suffix “-ure” as used in the French word "peinture", meaning painting, or the word “sculpture”. With this gesture, he not only points out that art is an action but also underlines the relationship between the work he creates and the act of art. Arslan’s works, in his own words, are “situated between painting, poetry, and philosophy.”

Moving to Paris in 1961, Arslan begins producing his first “artures” in 1962. In his series of “artures” titled "Influences", painted in the early 1980s, he focuses on writers, thinkers, poets, and musicians from prehistoric times to the present who have influenced his own identity and art. Combining different disciplines, traditions, and cultures, these “artures” epitomise the encyclopaedic aspect and approach, which also has an important role in Renaissance thinking. The artist’s interest in sexuality, the human body and psychology also becomes a focal point in the series "Influences". In the 2000s, Arslan returns to the readings that have affected him and produces a new series titled "New Influences". This new series, in addition to elaborating on inspiring writers and thinkers, includes themes such as insanity, illness and anxiety, which Arslan has been scrutinising in his practice for many years. The references in the works titled "Arture 546", "Arture 647", and "Arture 735", centre on the relationship between the human and nature: Robert Walser, who wrote about the countryside and its various landscapes in his short stories, stopped writing in the last years of his life, spent in a psychiatric hospital, and died while having one of his daily walks in the snow; The Ancient Roman historian and naturalist Pliny the Elder is known as the author of the first and most comprehensive encyclopaedia of his time, first printed in 1469 under the title "Naturalis Historia".