The man who eats flowers, or the passage to a new stage in creation.

Suzana Vaz, August 2017

All in Sumer Erek’s recent work seems to point to a bare, ultimate materiality, such as breathing or doodling, as if in a process of relinquishing all conventions of art – language, representation, meaning. Not by chance, but in great serendipity, one of the outcomes of Erek’s ongoing project The Need to Doodle reenacts the childhood experience of doodling on a steamed glass. The very breath creates the ephemeral surface to imprint on, the action of doodling as essential and candid as breath itself. There is a liberating force to this sufficiency in poetic means and a sense of wonder in the integrity of the accomplishment, inaugurating a different creative autonomy, the perception of a new inwardness full of power of transmission.

In Erek’s work, the natural arrival to breath, or breathing, is in line with the importance always ascribed by the artist to vital human needs, such as shelter, recently resumed in Broken Tide, or food and nourishment, directly present in Yeasting Canvas. These basic human needs are used as references for the highest human aspirations.

‘In the morning of the 21st of July, I thought I was going to have a typical, normal breakfast, but a moving thing happened. I picked a few edible flowers from my garden and arranged them in a plate. As I prepared to eat them I was smitten with their beauty… I thought, ‘It’s not fair to have all this beauty by myself when so many people are starving, or on hunger strike for a better world, or dying from starvation, or struggling to have some food’. Tears streamed down my face. I felt the urge to invite all the souls of those who have died of hunger to join me in the meal. While I was eating, it felt as if this was my very first meal. I felt grandness, happiness, joy and a complete wholeness. I was connected not only to a personal need, attending to it, but to the collective need, providing for it.’

The participatory feature of Erek’s work originates in a will to share the experience, which also structures the exchange procedures typical of his projects. These facilitate a personal appropriation of the experience, and can change according to the audience or place, incorporating autochthonous references, influences, or developments of the project itself. This versatility ensures the constant flow of creative initiative in response to a present state of understanding, feeling, sensing, knowing. The experience is permanently enriched, always novel, to be shared anew. The plurality of resources sets a degree of redundancy, the different poetic means as many keys to access the existential condition that is central to the work, pivotal in the grasping of the project.

Sumer told his young son of his recent experience, and he wrote: […] ‘O, joy be upon me, for I have tasted the fruits of happiness and claimed it for those lost within the mists of death and despair. Better and beyond compare to that consumed within the moments shortly following the passionate embrace of a lover. For I am alone yet not lonely.’ […] The once familiar ritual made itself clear to the man, for his breakfast had often been reaped from the oasis surrounding him, yet the happiness that had eluded him before now eluded him no longer. […] He reached forward and felt the leaves as though they were the flesh of a lover, and produced a scalpel from between his fingers, cutting the skin from the stem and folding the leaves within his palm. And from the wounds blossomed flowers. These too, he picked. […] A river of tears fell from his face towards the ground, and from above him they fell too. Before me they transformed into the shapes of children, of women and of men, their faces too, filled with tears. Yet their tears were no longer that of sadness, but that of contentment. And as he ate, they too ate of the flowers.”

A poem came to the mind of the artist when reading his son’s words. The poet Nazım Hikmet asked his friend, the painter Abidin Dino, “Can you draw the picture of happiness, Abidin? / Don’t draw it too easily, / Not a picture of a mother with rosy cheeks who suckles her baby / and neither apples on a white tablecloth / and don’t draw a red fish wandering around the bubbles in an aquarium, / Can you draw the Summer of 1961 in Cuba? / I’m grateful to be alive, / Can you draw that I found peace of mind and can now die?”

Flowers are aesthetic masterpieces of creation. The man who savours flowers nourishes himself with the subtlest of foods, the most delicate and vibrant, the most sublime. Inside of him they seed themselves as events of plenitude, blossoming as an ultimate creative achievement. He takes hold of a natural creative power, thus liberating himself from all conventions of creation to restore the intrinsically human essence of every creative process. Still coming to terms with the experience, Erek prepares meals seasoned with flowers and invites dear friends to partake in his transformation. It is by no means a coincidence that the ephemeral doodling on a steamed glass timely preceded the momentous breakfast of flowers. Indeed, Erek’s biography is punctuated by the ocurrence of initiatory deaths, successively marking the closing of a cycle and the end of a mode of being with the rebirth to a new stage and the inauguration of a new mode of being. This seems to be the case, as we witness the shift presently unfolding.