Halil Akdeniz And The Dream Of Earth (Arredamento Dekorasyon, November 1993)
Halil Akdeniz, in his art, seems to rise from a dream nourished by the soil beneath him, a soil which has known the footstep and hoofprint of countless civilizations; and seeking in memory, as he awakes, those bygone mysteries, he sets to work. In a stil timelessness, the memory-bank he brings into being through his use of the visible, creates paintings which reveal themselves, outdating themselves with each act of remembrance. Here is a world dictated by a wisdom from beyond time, which has mastered the Secret, and which scatters (as if they were stones smoothed by the watery streambeds of the mind) signs lingering over from a vast dream that is, in fact, the unconscious of a whole people and its culture. Akdeniz creates this ideographic clues, and the austere remnants of unknown languages, through an archaeology of painting that builds by scraping only its own surface. The surface, scraped in an act of measuring and being measured, yields history that reveals itself, yields themes and traces that precipitate their mystery, the further the surface is scraped away. Akdeniz’s sharp, absolute triangles point to the timelessness beyond their edges just to the degree that they complete the feeling of place within them. History and culture sail into a dignified calm in an equation of space and time set up by green and brown (each constituting the patina of the other)- and it is an equation known to Akdeniz alone. Confronted with a true work of art, there are moments which one attempts neither to understand nor to explain. The angle from which to view Akdeniz is poetry. Wisdom is supreme, brought by the Φ of ‘Philosophy’ to these Lycian surfaces through a wearing clear accomplished on one stone face of timelessness. Or we look again, and see a Hittite idol beside one letter of some strange alphabet worked long into a seal. The richness of history lies not necessarily in its layers, but also in the mystery that is spread between them. This is mystery, a secret, which Akdeniz has learned.
Hüseyin B. Alptekin