The series of found landscape paintings are concealed behind rust and monochrome beige paint, revealing only small fragments through scratched surfaces. Erkan uses an ornamental facade technique used in construction, similar to sgraffito, to create these obstructed views. While rust, achieved through the oxidation of iron-based paint, comes as a reminder of temporal corrosion through exposure to the natural elements, such as humidity and sea minerals, the use of the color beige is a reference to the numbing repetition of the same. The supposed neutrality and calming effect of the color acquires a disturbing normative quality through its expansive, repetitive use. Once concealed behind these material processes, the artist’s intervention through gestures of “scratching” serves to excavate fragments from the original painting, thus creating an “inner” or “personal” realm made visible only through a tear on the surface.

Like obstructed windows, these paintings turn the romantic idea of “looking inwards while looking out“ from a window into a modernist abstraction. As part of the exhibition’s installation, they humorously twist and expand on the threefold design quest modern summer housing projects must meet: the house must function as an object of speculation; it must be in proximity to beaches; it must have a view. Processes of growth and decay appear simultaneously here as the model houses facing the paintings are looking at their future providence.