Interview - Simon Von Booy
		The Spirit, the Body; Exile. By Simon Von Booy Eser Afacan’s Paintings Examine the Human Condition in all its Terror and Vulnerability The figurative realism of Turkish-born painter, Eser Afacan, is a stark and brilliant evocation of the existential despair and passionate longing that often characterize the human experience. Through his works, Afacan explores those grand themes man has wrestled with in the ancient metaphors of holy books and in the writings of significant contributors to western-literature, especially Shakespeare and Freud. Afacan’s human subjects are trapped in the figurative ‘other.’ Places both unrecognizable and terrifyingly familiar—the external realization of their own interior landscapes. And Afacan displays an unfailing empathy for his characters in their exile from an incomprehensible existence. Afacan’s style is a seamless mélange of classical genres of painting and examines close-up what painters like Pieter Bruegel showed us from afar. In several of Afacan’s paintings, people cling to one another, gazing upward—outside of the canvas into a space shared equally with the viewer. However, in works like Woman and Shadow, the beauty of the human body is suspended and celebrated before the viewer at the exact moment when physical and spiritual harmony become indistinguishable. While Afacan’s paintings might seem like bleak interpretations of human life, rather they are rare and beautifully poised glimpses of an inner loneliness within a painfully secular universe. In Eser Afacan’s paintings, humans drift between light and shadows in a world where we are each other’s only hope—irremediably dependent on one another. Afacan’s work casts a net over universal human feelings and presents them with tender and uncompromising humanity.