Aslı Torcu

Aslı Torcu is a painter. Born in Turkey (1981), she currently lives and works in France, specifically the Parisian region, since 2005.

Born in Turkey (1981), Aslı Torcu currently lives and works in France, specifically the Parisian region, since 2005. She has completed her education at the Painting Department of Mimar Sinan University, Istanbul, and has then gone on to complete her master degree and PhD at the Université Paris VIII, where she also worked as a teacher. She had her first solo exhibition “Reminiscence” at the Zilberman Gallery in Istanbul in 2011. She also participated in group exhibitions such as, "18ème Prih Antoine Marin", and "Novembre à Vitry" in France, and then "Past and Future", and "Disquiet" in Turkey. Her work is in the collection of Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, of the Elgiz Museum and also in several private collections around the world.

Aslı's artistic work is closely related to the subject of memory and is particularly inspired by archival images. Her essentially figurative approach emerges from a colourful atmosphere that is relatively pictorial and fundamentally the result of abstraction.

"My process starts from a search for the pictorial atmosphere that structures the universe of each of my paintings. In the beginning, this space is abstract, composed of colors and shapes, with the painting being made up of multiple temporalities by a stratification of pictorial material. The surface of the painting is a chaotic fabric, but also proliferates with Proustian accidents, with reunions. There, the memory is the source from which emanates the imagination, it brings out the snatches of intimacy and I try to make visible the affective presence in this resonance. It is an act of reminiscence during which we find our emotions and discover in a direct way through colour and form things of which we are aware, but which must have been difficult to locate in our minds.

The main concerns of my artistic work are to remember and to forget, to resist against time or embrace disappearance. My interest in photos or documents from the past develops around these axies, but I still have an internal relationship with these images within the framework of intimacy. I try not to conceal my creative process, but to instead bring out what is in me as faithfully as possible while privileging coincidences, accidents and without putting myself at a distance. I don't work for a purely formal goal. Only the things that touch me can set in motion my creative process.

I often work with vernacular type photographic documents. Based on figurative (or non-figurative) data, within my works the images appear and disappear along the creation process, the colour undertakes its function of creating a dreamlike atmosphere triggered by an affect, a continuously transforming space for remembering, rendering visible this atmosphere that penetrates into the depths of creative thought." – Aslı Torcu, 2021

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