My paintings seem to be a result of the drive to explain myself. What makes me paint is the desire to confront myself, to take note of my acquisitions, to play with reality and finally to transfer all of this to a surface. My painting always interferes with external reality, breaks up and rearranges the surface. What I expose is the image of my personal observation beyond the construction conflicting with the objective...

Cansen Ercan, 2009

…The reasons that urge a person to paint, that is: above all the desire of the painter for self-reckoning and self-confrontation, the drive to accumulate the results of this confrontation and finally the wish to display this accumulation, to be viewed, are what sustain the motivation to create. The end result is what the artist packs in his suitcase when he embarks upon this voyage within himself: what he has witnessed and the mysteries he carries with him. Drawing considered an “entirety” in itself is the artist’s most simple and fresh, most intact aspect. It is his subjective streak that finds significance in daily life. Behind the composition resulting from the conflict between the subjective and the objective, what the artist has personally witnessed shoulders the credibility of the painting…

Cansen Ercan
November 2008

Observations and mysteries…
I have visited Cansen Ercan’s exhibition several times. The exhibition is in the neighborhood gallery Harmony. During my last visit on Saturday, as I walked among the paintings thinking about the introduction to the article I was planning to write abut the show, I learned that Cihat Aral who held an extraordinary exhibition in the same gallery last month had told Cansen that she was the best pastel painter since Burhan Uygur. There, I told myself, that is the introduction to your article. I hope Aral doesn’t mind my quoting him. But I could not pass by a master’s evaluation of a painter younger than himself. For my part, I warm more and more to Cansen Ercan’s paintings with every visit. I think it’s the smooth color transitions, the non-clashing patches and the serenity dominating the whole work that attract me to her paintings as I watch them over and over again…

Egemen Berköz
Cumhuriyet
November 20, 2008

“An artist’s way of accumulating his observations is different from others; he sorts, adds, multiplies, reorganizes the observations he accumulates and converts them into media. This accumulation becomes a painting on a surface surrounded by graphic and plastic components. My entire issue lies in the problems I state within this graphic framework and in the solutions I propose for these problems. In this context the media serve the language. It would be wrong to look for components that could form a basis for literature and poetry independently from graphic concerns, plastic significance and artistic criteria in my work. All the components I use in my paintings have equal importance. The focus in a landscape may correspond to a light spot. Or it may move depending on the composition of the painting on the surface. Based on my belief that every painting has its mathematics, I think of the distribution of these centers of gravity or positive and negative areas – the dynamics of their disposition on the surface – as determined by the mathematics of the painting. In a tachist approach and concentrating on simplicity, I gray colors as a means of creating an effect of ‘much’ with ‘little’. On the other hand, I use a wide range of grays. Every color is important; for the time being, grayed colors have more importance for me. Assuming that the world is not apt to produce further geniuses, what matters for me is to try to connect to art history using its milestones as references and to achieve an individualism with universal artistic values. Working, continuity and speed have also been important for me throughout my career. I have refrained from exaggeration and sentimentalism and replaced them with simplicity, intensity and sparsity. I prefer relating to the spectator by means of the components of the painting and plastic values.”

Cansen Ercan
April 2007

“Cansen Ercan transports us to the mysterious atmosphere of every object, every being that she doggedly approaches, thinking and rethinking them countless times, claiming the values distilled by the millenial values of a branch of fine arts we call ‘painting’. She knows how to stop the spectator in his tracks with her simple and uncompromising style, never falling on cheap, ordinary effects.”

Turan Erol
Cumhuriyet Gazetesi
5 Mayıs 2006

“Cansen Ercan has always aroused my interest. Because she insistently, with beautiful obstinacy claims the everlasting values of painting (the traditional drawing skill, color sensitivity and the power of expression handed down to the present by their infinite combinations). Transcendence is a point to be reached as a result of insistence and obstinacy. A person? Nature? Still life? The city?... As Cansen Ercan recreates herself with the combinations of this insistence and by the consciousness of the painter, she surrounds and holds the spectator with a sensibility and melancholy. Thereby reproducing the spectator’s consciousness and sensitivity. Cansen Ercan’s paintings do not present artful devices at first sight. They are calm, quiet, earnest and modest. Here lie Cansen Ercan’s devices: she produces without saying ‘I have produced’ and creates without saying ‘I have created’. I find that Cansen Ercan has reached a sublime synthesis.”

Hulki Aktunç
Cumhuriyet Gazetesi
19 Aralık 2005