Art Collector John Ball on Artist Ilyas Kirkan
London April 2004

My strongest reaction when I first saw Kirkan’s artwork was a purely sensuous response to the blues, as I love the colour blue.

The pieces, seems to me to be about dreams and memories, dreams perhaps recalled imperfectly by the memory as a mood rather than a description. The dream seems to be the primary experience and they are dreams informed by art, dreams of a sophisticated mind which is at home in European art and philosophy; but perhaps we can detect the artist’s Kurdish and Middle-eastern background and culture, notably in the rich interplay of the blues with other colours and in their elaborate surface textures.

For Kirkan the pieces relate to places and languages, which hold a special significance in his life, so through the transparency of the paint we see the collages with their words as well as the sand and gravel collected from different cities.

These paintings seems to me to inhabit much the same world as those of Howard Hodgkin who also represents specific experiences and places in the form of seemingly purely abstract images; but Kirkan’s pieces always give us stronger clues to their origins.

I have known Kirkan’s artwork for two years and during that time I have continually been impressed, even startled, by the great strides he has made in his work, both technically and conceptually. There has been a tremendous gain in the strength and power of his paintings. Here is an artist who really seems to be going places.