Alma Ausente 1959

Erol Akyavaş made this work, Alma Ausente, with a delicate, almost ghostly touch. The colours are muted – lavenders and greys – creating a hazy, dreamlike atmosphere, and the making looks like a search, or a quest. The surface is scrubbed and layered, with thin washes of paint building up a complex, textured ground. There's a real sense of the materiality of the paint; you can almost feel the brushstrokes and the way the pigment has been worked into the canvas. Look at the spindly lines that reach down from the central form, almost like roots searching for purchase, or maybe drips, the work feels delicately balanced between order and chaos, abstraction and figuration. It reminds me a bit of some of the early abstract expressionists, like Philip Guston, who were also grappling with how to represent emotion and experience through pure form. Ultimately, this painting remains open to interpretation, inviting us to bring our own associations and feelings to the viewing experience.