In an article written on December 26, 2013 about Erkan’s paintings, Vinay Dharwadker, Professor of Literature at the University of Wisconsin, wrote the following poetic lines:

“These paintings made me think yesterday of a short poem by the contemporary Indian woman poet, Gagan Gill, which she wrote in Hindi when she was a young woman in Delhi, and which I translate as follows:

Sorrow in Happiness

The sea has the sorrow of the wounded sea-turtle

The tree-trunk has the sorrow of the dying root

The storm has the sorrow of the man on the verge of defeat

Who has the sorrow that lies in happiness?”

In Erkan’s earlier works, preceding the paintings of his latest period, the rocks floating around the figures gradually transformed into the debris left behind by destruction.

Yet this debris does not point to a destruction that occurred at any specific moment in history. Rather, it reveals philosophy’s way of looking at the age.

The destruction within this conceptualized dusty atmosphere appears as a form that exposes a profound truth.

After visiting Erkan’s “Stones/Women/Ashes” exhibition on July 15, 2010, Necmiye Alpay quoted from her review in her column for Radikal:

“Two opposing visual languages. In Botero, we see figures inflated like balloons, evoking a sense of lightness. In Erkan, however, the figures are dense and heavy, like lead.”