Catalogue essay by Marie-Laure Desjardins on Turkish artists Ece Clarke LG and her uncle Niyazi Toptoprak, for their first joint French exhibition, uniting two artistic visions in a shared search for the hidden essence of reality.
The family home exuded art. The little girl never missed an opportunity to sneak into her uncle’s bedroom. Paintings were everywhere, on the walls, on the floor and on easels. The boy, 9 years her senior, had been fascinated since childhood by everything that makes a mark. He tried to understand how pencils, chalk, charcoal, but also his mother’s lipstick or his sister’s nail varnish could leave an imprint. One day, Ece exclaimed in front of a dark-coloured war painting by Niyazi: ‘You’ve become a painter now!’ She was no more than 5 years old, but they both remember it. Her uncle, who was old enough to be her brother, gave her her first brushes and tubes of paint. Ece was at secondary school at the time and Niyazi encouraged her to find her own path. There was no doubt about it. The strangeness of his landscapes has always captivated him. He would devote his future to them. Nature glimpsed through the window of a train or bus is transformed by his hand, revealed through his gesture. While the painter was busy holding many exhibitions, Ece was living in Germany, travelling extensively and finally settled in London. Almost 20 years after her first experiences, she exhibited for the first time in Istanbul. The event left its impressions on the artist and reinforced the idea shared by Niyazi: art is the quest of a lifetime.
There are affiliations that go beyond simple blood ties. Between Ece Clarke and Niyazi Toptoprak, the kinship has deepened over time: that of the gaze that questions the invisible, that of the pictorial gesture that attempts to capture its sensitive manifestations. Both are part of an approach in which painting, going beyond representation, scrutinises the very essence of the world. They both work in different ways to make perceptible the hidden reality, the latent presence that only art can reveal. Bringing their works together in the same exhibition opens up an intersection at the frontiers of their two visions, where the sincerity and pugnacity of their research are in harmony.
Although Ece Clarke has recently produced a series of works inspired by the figures discovered at the prehistoric site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, not far from the border with Syria, her painting is not figurative. She engages in a dialogue with matter, in its most tangible dimension. Through a play of hollows, coils, seams and inclusions of organic and mineral elements, she fashions interstices where the visible seems to emerge from the hollow and the fold, where the thing sought emerges at the whim of a physical exploration of paper and metal alike. Each work contains a secret cartography, an intimate geology from which a buried memory emerges. Beyond this transformation, the surfaces become places of unveiling: they welcome the light, diffuse it, retain it and release it, inscribing the work in a time that unfolds, coils and flees. Carried away by the different states of the material, our gaze plunges into an unstable sensation, moving from emergence to disintegration, from alteration to persistence. The painting is no longer a surface but a space, traversed by an inner vibration reminiscent of some of Anselm Kiefer’s work, where the material becomes a memory of the world, a trace of a passage, an imprint of time. Niyazi Toptoprak follows an entirely different path. His paintings are phenomena. His landscapes are apparitions. Uncertain territories where the eye hesitates between dream and ideal. Transparency is omnipresent, giving his compositions a dream-like, symbolic dimension, where shapes seem able to appear and dissolve with the slightest blink of an eyelid. Cameo air currents snake through the skies, drawing other shapes in hollows. Beams of light cross the horizon, surprising us with their alignments of treetops pointing towards eternity. The image invites active contemplation. It asks questions. This quasi-magical nature revisits the great philosophical questions. What is the world made of? Can we trust our senses? Painting is not an illusion of reality; it plunges through the visible surface of things to reach a deeper truth, like Paul Klee’s blue landscapes, where abstract forms come together with certain recognisable signs of nature.
Although the works of Ece Clarke and Niyazi Toptoprak develop a different plastic expression, they pursue the same quest. Both question nature and, even more, the profound nature of reality. In Clarke’s case, this exploration involves coming face to face with the work, establishing an exchange between the tangible and the intangible, between what can be seen and what remains hidden. With Toptoprak, this exchange unfolds in the fluidity of forms and the impermanence of appearances, as if each landscape were a moment suspended between presence and disappearance. Both, in their own way, celebrate the visible as an enigma, a fragile promise. Where Clarke delves into paper, oil, bitumen and copper, Toptoprak invites us on a journey between light and shadow. The meeting of their works highlights two artistic practices that share the same conviction. That painting is not simply a matter of representation but of revelation; that it is not a mirror of the world but its emergence. Between perception and mystery, the works of Ece Clarke and Niyazi Toptoprak remind us that to see is always to seek a presence that eludes us.
Marie-Laure Desjardins Feb 2025
This essay appeared in the catalogue for the exhibition ‘A la recherche de ce qui se dérobe’. The first joint exhibition in France by Turkish artists Ece Clarke LG and Niyazi Toptoprak. Which took place at 24 BEAUBOURG, 24 rue Beaubourg, Paris 75003 France 2-12 April 2025. Exhibition curator: Marie-Laure Desjardins.
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