Zeyno Arcan is not a painter. Zeyno Arcan is a medium. A channel through which the flux of life passes and opens out to resound in her works. “The function of art is not to produce nature,” Balzac famously claimed, ”but to interpret it”.

But Zeyno Arcan no more produces reality than she interprets it.

She brings it to light.

Quite literally. Light radiates from the canvasses and from the artist’s vision. A light that is present everywhere, even at the obscure margins of the real. A light that only a narrow, ailing, partially amputated vision fails to grasp. A light that Zeyno Arcan ceaselessly pursues, observes and tames like a lover in order to capture it and give it to those of us who aren’t able to see it. This is why Zeyno Arcan is a medium, a superconductor of reality. You only have to see her at work. You only have to listen to her speaking about her work that is her life and her life that is her work.

But more importantly, you have to take a look at her painting which tells the story of a quest: how to find the spirit in matter? Not beyond it, but through it?

Like a reflection of what she looks for and the place where she looks for it, Zeyno Arcan’s canvasses themselves are an accumulation of matter, a superposition of layers, imprints, memories of bodies, assemblages of fabrics and veils that transform the picture’s two-dimensional plane into a space with depths, transparencies, levels and contours.
Beyond the support treated in this way, the subject matter itself is substance, and a noble one at that: the human body. A body in all its states, in all its genders, one should say, for the dualism of masculine/feminine is at the heart of the project. But the strength of Zeyno Arcan’s work is to transcend this purely descriptive biological fact to reveal the complementarity and even the unity of the human being beyond sexual differentiation.
Thus, by intuition and creative inspiration, she concurs with the works of Jungian psychology and with those of recent American theories of race and gender. The masculine and the feminine are social and cultural constructs unlinked to the biological determination of sex. Rather than being a fixed norm, a reduced binary choice, human identity is a gallery where individuals construct and deconstruct fluctuating identities, all of which lie within the fundamental unity of an Eros that is masculine and feminine at the same time.

Finally – perhaps primarily – what is most touching in this pictorial exploration of identity is the way it uses matter to access spirit and feeling. For as she works through new approaches, techniques and exploits, Zeyno Arcan never stops asking the same question, over and over: What is the ineffable mystery, the spiritual secret not spoken by words but expressed by the body? And does there exist in the anatomy, the superposition, the fusion or the entanglement of bodies a form (the form) of love?
If one had to apply a scholarly term to this ambitious and exalted undertaking, one might speak of morphophychology. But it can be fittingly described using one of the simplest and most beautiful of words, a word that is love itself: tenderness.

Philippe Ségur
… Read More