Canan Tolon, 1955

Having studied philosophy, design, interior design, and architecture in cities around the world, Canan Tolon treats architecture as a starting point, frequently using perspectives and multiple vanishing points to explore nature, culture, habitats, industry, and human behaviors. The artist takes inspiration from the changing balances between humans and nature, and the architectural traces borne of this relationship.

Canan Tolon deals with such themes as environmental insensitivity and the loss, impairment, and corruption of nature by culture. She uses a variety of media ranging from painting to installation, problematizing the human struggle with nature, culture, life and death. She investigates the cycles of nature and how art may be sustained in other areas of life through the use of such natural materials and processes as straw, grass and rust. The natural materials that she chooses to use in her paintings and arrangements are already beginning to decay, so the completed work is determined entirely by the natural transformations of these materials. In her most recent paintings Tolon emphasizes the values that we have torn down and thrown away through her depictions of abandoned and barren scenes of vast, desolate terrains and battlefields, reeking of death.

Sometimes using natural materials such as straw, grass, and rust, she projects the natural cycle of nature onto diverse media, from painting to installation. “Untitled”, as this work is called, recalls abstract images and is formed by the rust, soot and dirt left by nature on the surface of the canvas. Tolon says her pictures are living entities and lets natural processes have their way with them for long periods. She points out the possibilities and impossibilities of the relationship between the rust stains she tries to organize and fundamental elements of pictorial art, like geometry, composition, color, form and texture.