Using all the possibilities of painting, Altan Çelem’s work represents everyday life in a most original way. His mode of representation is far from imitation: it attracts the viewer’s attention by the thoughtful construction of his work associated with his experimental use of colour. Çelem embraces the adventure of painting and believes that each new theme can produce original creations. Thus, he assimilates the facts and brings them together with his own perception. Çelem’s simple approach to the objects of material and spiritual culture which surround him shapes the concrete world which he esteems. In addition, he combines these objects with the “things” he wants. Each object exists in its singularity, no matter whether the artist relates to it or not, whether he esteems it or not.
Çelem elevates his style to a precision which bears testimony to the images that appear and disappear in time and space, in landscapes as in figures. This necessary testimony addresses time from a broad perspective which includes both everyday life and urban culture, spatial perceptions and mind-body relations. It brings times close to the axes discussed by Henri Lefebvre, the famous French intellectual known as the “master of modernism”. This understanding relying essentially on the different forms of flows between the linear and cyclical time does not refrain from looking at the age of modernity, as Çelem does in his works. “Urban transformation” is one of the elements we encounter the most when look at these times under the guidance of Çelem’s work.
