Cevdet KOCAMAN
An Artist seen with Nordic Eyes
My first impressions of Cevdet Kocaman’s works are from the middle of the eighties, where he attended the graphic section of the Danish Design School in Copenhagen. His drawing skills and thoroughness when observing the details are noticeable, qualities which naturally led him on to working with the portrait. He has made a great many portraits in Western Europe as well as in Turkey.
Kocaman’s relations to the colours in his oil and acrylic paintings and his characteristic way of working with the colours quite clearly relate to the traditions af one of the important art movements from the beginning of the 20th century, the artist group “Der Blaue Reiter” (1911), of whic such painters as Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke and Paul Klee were members. The members did not work within a certain stile of art but rather with a common wish to extend the limits of the artistic possibilities of expression.
Cevdet Kocaman seems to have been inspired to a great extent by August Macke’s paintings, especially his delicetely blended colours, soft lines and meditative contents. Surely Kocaman’s childhood in Trakya with its generously curved and fertile landscape lies deeply rooted in his mind and is refleceted in his painting, using his oevres as a language - a neoromantic interpretatinon af reality.
Franz Marc expressed it in this way:” I always try to intensify my feelings for the organic rhythm of the substance, in order to reach a pantheistic insight of the throbbing and flowing life, of nature’s bloodstream - af trees, of animals and of the air”. (The idea of the colours as independent elements, which are able to arouse stark feelins within the spectator, does ta a vertain extent derive from theories of the Goethe chromatology).
Apparently Kocaman works like a Marc and a Macke, with the psychological values of the colours, without giving up completely the figurative.
Parallel to working with oil and acryl Kocaman has worked with water-colour painting - the easy/difficult media. Especially within the last year Kocaman has developed his techniques with a happy spontaneity and delight in colours without giving up the composition.
He has endeed shown an extra dimension of his talent.
Ole Zøfting-Larsen, Nikolaj Plads 1.10.2003
