Halil Akdeniz (Monograph, Enlem 80, 1995)
Halil Akdeniz is an artist who enriches universality not only through the problematics of his art but also through the fact of it. While this may be partly due to the wealth of possibilities afforded by the land in which Akdeniz finds himself, it is also in large part thanks to the universal sensibility which he has made his own. The elements which make up the body of Akdeniz’s oeuvre, and its odyssey as a whole, draw their life from sources as yet otherwise untapped; and his treatment reworks them so that they become part of the collective unconsious.
In Akdeniz’s painting there is a shattering of axes –past-future, east-west, ancient-modern- as time and space are reconstituted. His art is an exploration, melding intelligence and feeling, randomness and calculation, cocept and phenomenon to test with its questioning the future as well as the past.
In the adventure which has brought him from the 1960s to the present day, Akdeniz has been through all the phases of his time, always, however, maintaining an originality that is oriented toward the interpenetration of cultures. Thus it is not singularist but pluralist, not exclusive but embracing.
The elements treated in Akdeniz’s work sometimes push materials to the limit, and sometimes transcend them to probe the conceptual. Thus the substructure of the works explores the variableness of perception and the visual, drawing the paintings into an intellectual realm. Akdeniz’s works ultimaletly regenerate themselves in a vacuum, as a tangible projection of the universal adventure and fate of man.
Hasan Bülent Kahraman