From the Paintings for Blinds Series

Hüsamettin Koçan studied art in the State School of Applied Fine Arts from 1966-1970. He returned there as a teaching assistant in 1975 and took part in the Salzburg Summer Academy of 1978. Earth is one of the most important features of Hüsamettin Koçan’s paintings and he uses it as a symbol as well as a material. Earth has served in one form or another as the point of departure for Koçan and his Anatolia-rooted art for almost two decades, and is itself part of the creative process. In his 'Paintings for Blinds' series, earth is used to create ridges on the surfaces of the works that trace barely discernible human figures. This imparts a sense of reality that transcends what we can actually see. Unlike Koçan’s earlier work in which he used a symbolic language for the visual elements and motifs of Anatolian culture, history, and geography, Paintings for Blinds works at a more conceptual level, exploring the idea of earth as a symbol of Anatolia and ‘the homeland’. A distinctive feature of Hüsamettin Koçan’s works is their apparent ability to restate their messages anew according to the different locations and circumstances of where they are being shown. These paintings assume that the viewer is blind; in other words, they define their perceptibility in terms of touch alone. However, when the pictures are exhibited in a museum they inevitably become 'untouchable' –even if only temporarily– and are treated as 'museum objects' that must be viewed from afar, almost like sacred idols. This creates an interesting contradiction between the works themselves and their inherent perceptibility.