Kat Kar Teknik 1981

Erol Akyavaş’s Kat Kar Teknik looks like it was made with watercolour, ink, and a really playful sense of composition. The washes of purple and blue create a dreamy, almost melancholic space, but then you’ve got these hard-edged shapes and graphic elements crashing in. It's a process that embraces the unexpected, the accidental. There's so much going on with the surface of this piece! I mean, look at the way Akyavaş uses these soft, diluted washes of colour, letting the paper breathe through the paint. It's like he’s building up layers of atmosphere, but then he throws in these crisp, hard lines and graphic symbols that feel almost architectural. The way he juxtaposes the fluidity of the washes with the precision of the lines gives the whole piece a kind of tension, a push and pull that keeps your eye moving. It reminds me of Hilma af Klint, who combined abstraction with esoteric symbolism. Both artists were interested in how images can be more than just representations, how they can be maps of the inner and outer world, questioning what we see.