His pictorial world, which is based on excellent drawings, uses a realistic painting style and is figurative and particularly figurative. He has tried out a number of stylistic variations. There are detailed depictions of animals as well as superimposed surfaces that suggest volume, onto which a few lines applied in isolated sweeps convey an apt, sometimes humorous expression. The palpable confidence in her strokes is complemented by painterly experiments with color gradients in lively still lifes with plays of light and reflections. Some of the watercolors depict village landscapes, which are provided with the most necessary contours and areas of color and depict the constellations of buildings in a partly tilted overhead perspective. The slight distortions of perspective that are hinted at here increasingly develop into combinatorial and fantastic worlds of form that have a narrative-surreal character. By retaining renaissance-like village building types and the dreamlike, weightless depiction of animal creatures and female figures that appear in his drawings, a touch of Chagall and De Chirico is mixed into the fantasy, which in part tends towards mid-axiality, but which follows its very own sober and precise symbolic combinatorics. 

In graphically rich gradations of hatching, urban spaces or coastlines are indicated, in which fairytale-like floating faces, bird creatures or winged seahorses are outlined as contours, into which narrative content is woven, as in the initials of medieval book illumination. Exterior and interior forms of buildings, plumage, scaffolding and other creatures nestle formally, associatively and logically into the dissected body parts. Memories of home, fairy-tale creatures, emblematic symbolism and occasional references to Christian and Muslim traditions, death and longing define the imaginative pictorial world. Arslan Arslanov plays with the possibilities of such formal similarities and analogies in the free blending of representational and figurative forms, in which faces become vases or an outstretched female body becomes a landscape within a landscape, whose bathrobe in turn becomes a sea of waves for a ship. The formal representation of bodies and the surreal game give rise to a play of forms that explores the themes of sexuality and gender relations. A muscular man supports a bowl with a motherly woman with children, while he rides on the dog-like nose of a female face with a testicular chin. 

The drawing of a crouching female figure with a duck's head, who is leaning on an egg and appears to have hatched it, is depicted in a strange green color and is probably also concerned with the question of role models. There is something convulsive and bizarre in the air, but it probably has something to do with the contradictory role of women between seductive and maternal femininity that is depicted here. Finally, an interesting combination of male and female bodies and sexual organs, a female breast torso with an acorn head and twisted testicle buttocks, squatting on a pole with male legs, is completely twisted and mixed up. Arslan Arslanov processes his sensations and life experiences in pictures which, full of ideas and with a confident stroke, increasingly deal with their own themes, which are able to touch us skillfully and without the ingredients of Western modernism.

Dr. Dirk Tölke - art historian