I wanted to paint the forest without belonging to any form; I don’t have a story, a visualization; I only have irrational and random motives, sometimes geometric and sometimes organic. All of them revived in a texture on the surface; I felt this and did this, on the bark of a tree, in a deep blue, in the infinite sky, in the middle of the desert and in the touch of a skin… that skin that hosts all of our hopes and suffering…
AŞKIN AKMAN
Aşkın Akman’s figures that try to get out of their shells reflect man’s will for struggle. Sometimes with a thick layer of paint and sometimes with thin paints on a controlled sandpaper layer by layer, Akman uses different techniques together. In a sense, this is the case of today’s human being who has to go from the reasoning of “either this or that” to “both this and that”.
Each work by the artist is the emergence of the ‘desire to paint’. The figure never separates from that desire, and in order to provide the connection between art and life, it makes a breakthrough operation in every attempt. One feels the trace of this struggle and its untamable energy on the artist’s canvas, and we are shown that although today’s canvas is full of ‘ways of seeing’ there are still things to do with hope in the name of art.
As Yalçın SADAK quotes Agamben* in his exhibition essay, “… without getting caught in the vicious circle of the market, *those who can see the signs of the archaic in the contemporary; those who experience the contemporary in a way that makes the present seem archaic may have a chance to survive. Aşkın Akman is a traveler on this path and he has obvious virtues that require us to vouch for his journey…”
