About the Artist

Arkın Demirel, born in 1979, is a French-Turkish contemporary artist who seeks to transcend the limits of artistic expression by creating works that invite viewers on an inner journey and create an intimate dialogue with them. His creations are characterized by a musicality and a palette of contrasting colors, a verticality and an uprightness, punctuated with altruism and spiritual comfort. He seeks to convey deep reflection through the timeless fluidity of water, birth and eternity. He creates moments of luminous pause with a bold commitment, not hesitating to express the affected silence, the muffled scintillation and the iridescences marked with life and hope. He glorifies green, but also appreciates yellow and remains indifferent to gray. With humility, he celebrates his vision of existence and translates, through successive layers of abstract lines, the importance of nuances and the weight of what is left unsaid. In his mind, he seeps through the gate of paradise and weaves his ideas to represent, in part, all the cloaks of forgotten seas and oceans.

Arkın Demirel uses sea, sky, earth and metal as metaphors for his artistic work. His main source of motivation in his artistic creation is to wrap his canvases in a sheet of emotion, in the form of rain or sun, ranging from blue to red, in order to express the full palette of the maturation process. He rejects geographical borders and erases geography to oppose the origin of conflicts. Through his paintings, he evokes the indelible mark of the broken truths of the past, crumpled and ignored by memories in search of a more superficial and material recognition. The truth not transmitted, but deeply scarred, dictates to him to react, to reveal through images the intolerable negation of the incurable collective wounds of souls dispossessed of their vibrations.

The artist seeks to establish contact, extended intimacy and an embedded context in his work. He creates the morning mists of the Paris streets and invites their inhabitants, usually so colorful and noisy, to collective rituals of peace, in a silent and contemplative gaze. He whispers and listens to the tones of the colors and entrusts his most unmentionable thoughts and secrets to the angels to accept the legacy of a grainy past between two countries and two cultures. De facto, his work also evokes childhood and the sweet and bitter memories of immigration.

Arkın Demirel implements an exercise in style that repairs brokenness, relieves pain and illuminates darkness. His works bear within them the testimony of a leafy past of his Parisian life, still standing to tell the story of a living glory of a thousand lights. He seeks to read and transpose on canvas the memories of city peoples who have passed through the same paths, having left traces in the present. The strong point of his artistic approach is the meeting of satin black with translucent white, which he handles with talent and generosity.