Nazım Mehmet who has an academic art education always mentions his admiration to Renaissance Art. However, it was Paul Eluard’s poems he was fascinated by and became the main source for his paintings. Paul Eluard was one of the announcers of Surrealist manifest. Being affected by the surrealist artists such as De Chrico, Dali and Matta, Nazim adopts the surrealist principle of scrutinizing and leaving free the creative subconscious. Intensifing his work around this principle, artist takes the subconscious dream images and makes them to exist isochronally as they are in a dream letting them to spread on the surface without any judgement.
Nazim has a fantastic style which he presents unrelated objects in an aura. It is not predictable to see impossible objects in his paintings as we see in the paintings of Dali. On the contrary, he choses objects from daily life that we are familier with but a relationship can not be interpreted between them. Such as a lobster, a key, a pomegranate, a sword, a pigeon or a sundial are being presented as they are creatures of a fantastic world. What we see in his paintings is daily objects are described in a manner that they reflect such a reality that does not belong to this world.
In the works of Nazim whose aim is to present a world which is surrealist, dreamlike and out of mind, human figures give the sense of being belonged to this world at first sight. However, we realise that they are related to another world when we see the figures raising from the ground with shining aureolas over their head. We can never see faces of human figures; either their faces are hidden behind a cover or their back is turned us. This is another aspect increasing the mistery and intensifying the sense of them being belonged to another world. Time to time, these figures appear to be winged angels surrounded by a spiritual light.
Book, birds and sundail are the common objects Nazim uses almost in all works. Book is the symbol for wisdom as well as justice; birds are the symbols of freedom; sundial indicates the life time passing by. It is observed, artist mostly spreads the objects over the rocks in a surrealist surroundings. Rocks and stones are the important issues in his works. According to him “stones and rocks have their own stories and experiences with in themselves. They are witnesses to the places where they sit and they are embedded with the memory of that place and layered with its history”.
Silence dominates the world of Nazim. Neither pain nor happiness is not the part of his world. Everything is like flowing in a silent eternity, and in that sense pictoral meaning of silence indicates metaphisical meaning. The gates suddenly appearing in the middle of the painting becomes evident as the passageway to a different metaphysical world and to the other dimensions.
Nazim opens out the doors towards the new creativities peculiar to his style with the surrealist world he creates in his paintings.

Nurdan KARASU GÖKÇE
/ artist /