According to this distinction, which Pamuk borrows from German poet-writer Friedrich
Schiller’s 1795 essay, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”, naïve poets (read: “artists”) are
those who embrace spontaneity, can disregard the critical and self-conscious mind and
create without overthinking; whereas the sentimental are those more prone to questioning
and criticizing, who are self-reflective and have lost their childish innocence. While I do not
quite agree with Pamuk in considering that Ali Kazma belongs entirely to the first category, I
tend to think that his view of the novelist actually applies to all artists: “The more the
novelist succeeds in simultaneously being both naïve and sentimental, the better he writes”.
Given that Pamuk is a writer who once dreamed of becoming a painter (and indeed still
paints today), while Ali Kazma is a visual artist particularly partial to writing, books and
literature, I assume that this frontier which extends between the naïve and the sentimental
poet may also stretch, with all its ambiguity, between the visual artist and the writer as well.
Pamuk argues that the fundamental task of novels is “to describe what it feels like to live in
this world”. Ali, on the other hand, asks another question: “And the burning question comes:
how to live?” Whatever the road both artists chose to follow, there is no doubt that they are
involved in a common quest. When all is said and done, we will find that the literature-
affiliated video works constitute two powerful additions to Ali’s poetic encyclopaedia. The
artist’s titanic task is not completed yet, however. His journey continues.

[Nilüfer Şaşmazer, excerpt from the essay written for the exhibition Sentimental, at New National
Museum of Monaco]