Yüksel Arslan

 It was two years ago that I attended an opening of Bilgi University's santralistanbul gallery to accompany the last İstanbul biennial art exhibition. The gallery itself was an extraordinary addition to the city -- a vast space created in an decommissioned power station; the Turkish counterpart to Britain's Tate Modern -- only santral had the wit to keep the original gubbins of the power plant, which is displayed as a science museum in its own right but which seems to be the German expressionist setting for some clash between ancient superheroes.

 The exhibition itself was called “Modern and Beyond” and was a retrospective of 50 years of Turkish art and a vivid demonstration of the extraordinary changes in Turkish society after 1950. At the time I recall being totally taken with one small portion of the exhibition devoted to the works of a Turk in Parisian exile by the name of Yüksel Arslan. These were brown, mud-colored drawings scratched from a medium the artist made from a recipe that included his own urine. The drawings had a squelchy sexuality and vicious political barbs -- a cross between Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks and the vicious caricatures of the pre-war German artist, George Grosz. While many of the themes were familiar, the drawings had an intelligence and obsessiveness that stood out, even in the crowded context of a half century of Turkish art.

 To accompany this year's biennial santralistanbul has organized a huge retrospective of Yüksel Arslan's work. It occupies three floors. I am not sure he would call himself an “original.” There is one series of drawings called “influences” which includes everyone from Francis Bacon to Hegel and Feuerbach, Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire and Robespierre's decapitated head. He clearly fits into the French surrealist movement. But original he is. There is a deliberate disconnect between the erudition he displays and the primitiveness of the technique. Many of his drawings -- he calls them “arture” not art -- are visual essays, explorations of a theme with a seeming disregard for composition.

 Yüksel Arslan, I learn from the voluminous catalogue that accompanies this exhibition, came from a working class family, born in 1933 in the Eyüp neighborhood of İstanbul. His first exhibition was in the corridor of his local high school when he had already declared himself not interested in painting as painting but in the painting of ideas. He followed a Bohemian track to Paris, where he was at first deemed too controversial (in 1961) to have anything but a private viewing of his work. His first (and prior to the current exhibition) and last return to Turkey was in 1967 when 10 of his paintings were confiscated by the police for obscenity.

 Curiously enough much of his work is filled with Ottoman influence and Arab calligraphy, years before someone like Erol Akyavaş made this the fashionable thing to do. He seems to have kept up an interest in things Turkish. His caricatures of Turkish politicians Alparslan Türkeş and Süleyman Demirel in some intangible way are the most brutal I have ever seen. They are incorporated into his notebook like some anatomical drawings. In the struggle with conformity, Yüksel Arslan has won.