About

Cemal Nazım Arslan's artistic practice is shaped around the concepts of nature, memory, surface, and waiting. In his works, nature is removed from being a merely represented visual field and is instead approached as a perceptual ground that intersects with human inner experience. Human presence is often absent in a direct sense; rather, a sense of existence is constructed indirectly through traces, absences, and transformed images associated with the human condition.

Arslan's production advances through an effort to detach the image from narrative and representation. Working across painting, video, photography, and installation, the notion of surface is redefined as both a physical and a conceptual field. Faces, landscapes, water, and cloud-like forms become tools that render visible the unstable nature of identity, memory, and affect.

Within this framework, the works do not aim to produce fixed meanings but instead expose the viewer to states of intensity, repetition, and encounter. Memory, in Arslan's practice, is treated as a variable, fragile, and fictional structure. Digital distortions, repeated imagery, and process-based arrangements point to the unreliability of remembrance and to shifting relationships with time.

Processes that emerge organically in nature—such as movement, burning, flow, and transformation—form both a formal and conceptual continuity in the artist's works. Overall, Arslan's practice positions the viewer not within a clearly articulated narrative but within silent, meditative, and at times unsettling thresholds. These thresholds offer an experiential space oscillating between the visible and the concealed, surface and depth, disappearance and persistence.