Voices Rising From The Depths In The Heart Of Nature: “Hold Your Breath and Listen!” (Ravelli Exhibition Cataloge, March 2004)
Nadide Akdeniz’s paintings lie directly at the center of the place where two important and inseparable components of the art phenomenon intersect. This intersection overlaps with life, and the two components are the artist and the work of art. The former abstracts herself from every sort of surrounding influence in her life to pour the secrets of an honest, pure discipline into her work. Akdeniz’s paintings, which at first blush seem to be depictions of nature, or at least to have their source in nature, transcend this apparent fact to push the envolope of imagination. As familiar, common leaves come together without applying pressure to one another, their every alingnment opens onto surrealist paths that fork with the imagination.
Intricate in structure even in its own world, the phenomenon known as reality waits to be discovered by the viewer under any one of the leaves. Perhaps what we should really be looking for are the worlds behind the depictions of nature which, thanks to the artist’s own observations, acquire new flesh and spirit on the canvas.
Nature has been polluted as a gray atmosphere weighs down upon it, but the artist favors looking at nature through an optical surface with a clear, detail-ferreting and realistic eye. Leaves are packed side by side and one upon the other, so closely as to leave not a single gap on the canvas, forming the material for a wall of vegetation which is alien to our world but covers, like a veil, the dimension of thought which we take to be the artist’s real world. At first glance this flora seems to have been beamed into our world from the far corners of some incomprehensible, unknown, utterly perplexing universe, but faced with its allure the viewer feels an irresistible desire to lose himself in its depths. Clashes, intersections, questions, interrogations, quarrels… One visits the iner world of humankind. Confronted with this monumental vision of the green world, all the repressed upheavals of the soul surface. Our spirit turns to a kind of civil war, dragging the body towards these new revelations.
Just as the body says it has achieved peace and should stop to render an accounting with what has been gained, objects hidden among the leaves (mannequins, used doll limbs bursting from the greenery, oxygen tanks, shoes, chairs, wind up birds and the like) show up to draw it once again into the whirpools of thought. No sooner has the tension that the greenery imposed on the mind subsided and peace been attained than inanimate objects, clashing with the milleu, arrive to renew the mental disquiet. “Red Chair”, “Adam and Eve”, “Stil Lifes in Nature”, “The Wind-Up Bird Series”, “The Used Doll Series”, “The Natural Products Series”… Inanimate objects at odds with their surroundings drag Nadide Akdeniz’s art toward waters in which highly complicated relations engage in hand-to-hand combat. This type of approach might well be labelled as surrealistic. In a world beyond the real, objects find themselves living in a new order, or rather in a new atmosphere. Unnoticed as daily time flows by, touched by our hands each day as we all but breath them in, these objects acquire a foreign cast on the canvas. As they are released from reality and take their place on the surface, what they actually do is return to their own reasons for being created, and their own states. For Akdeniz, the die has been cast!
Appearing to be the dominant element of the picture, the vegetation is transformed (when the objects emerge) into a new theatrical scene in which the theme gains importance. The longest line is spoken by the objects, as well as by the human figures and cakes which Akdeniz has used in her recent work. Henceforward the gaze of the viewer and his/her interrogation, both directed at the plants, are plump in the middle of the theme.
At this stage Works which might facilely be labelled “pictures depicting nature” attain to a different dimension. Our description in the first sentences of the artist who “abstracts herself from every sort of surrounding influence in her life to yield herself purely up to nature” now comes via all these attempts at analysis to the point we wish to reach: Thanks to the peace bestowed by nature, the human soul achieves purity, simplicity and tranqulility. Lovely, fresh, relaxing, humane feelings come to the fore. Having surrendered itself up to nature, the body is ready to experience numerous other positive adjectives.
As for complexity, it is felt in trying to understand the symbols which Nadide Akdeniz scatters among the walls of vegetation-in trying to understand not they are but what they are not. Such clashing adjectives as relaxed-tense, peaceful-disturbing, and beatiful-harsh come together on the same surface. The true color of the affair has by now changed. Like a magnet, these pictures pressure the familiar meaning and forms of nature. And forms wrap and entangle the body within and without.
Rather than wondering what happens outside the surface, the viewer of a Nadide Akdeniz painting seeks to make out the intermediary tones of the polyphony within the frame. Is it just this that keeps her paintings on their feet? Or is there also a path leading to the world of the artist, who with her brush hides in a corner of the unseen, unknown space behind the work? It is a question of utter wholeness uniting nature and the object-figure on the surface. The accumulation of leaves spreads quickly but prudently in an attempt to conceal mysteries, and when the latter are deciphered the viewer feels relief. As if whispering the mystical notes of a rite, carefully selected objects and nature complement one another despite their opposition. Cascading like a waterfall in the midst of the unknown, the plants are on their own, without any soil in which to strike root or gain a foothold. The goal is not restricted to the earth or sky, and therefore the vegetative composition is the outcome not of any sketch of photograph, but rather of an original application of paint wedded to the demans of the language of art. In planning all this composition, Akdeniz feels no need of preparatory work. The subject and starting pointing of the painting are clear, as each leaf and branch picks its own path to arrive at the objects. When it comes to the point of intersection, traces formed in the artist’s memory link to one another. And thus we pass through a doorway on the picture surface, a doorway opening onto another world, and surrender ourselves up to the artist’s memory.
Nadide Akdeniz’s career started in the 1970’s, and one may summarize the evolution in her artistic approach, leading up to the present, as “Figure-figure, figure-surroundings, object-vegetation, depictions of sensitive observation of the external world based on interpretations of figure and object.” Thought gains transparency under a shell symbolized by the figure and object. It acquires dynamism, and the painting begins to live and move, as each form used slips free of its own.
Although the artist generally avoids symbols associated with sex, by representing as erect the bodies that carry all those leaves she alludes to the perfection of fertility, that life’s vein of nature. Believing that nature exists for the purpose of vitality and reproduction, the artist is in agreement with her model. For nature is there to reproduce, live and exist. Thus Akdeniz believes there is no need to make a reckoning with the kind of nature that drags along on the ground. A healthy atmosphere is what makes possible fertility as well as the continuation of life and multiplication. Plants depicted with verticals and usually with a color opposite to green (white, red) along with flowers, which in nature undertake the task of reproduction-these are the harbingers of a secret eroticism.
In her paintings Nadide Akdeniz seeks, via the meanings she assigns to materials, to analyze phenomena related to the life of humanity, as well as their exploration at the level of society. This artist, whom we might call “the magician of the green world,” continues on her way, illuminating the realities of human life with the light cast by the world of plants.
Dilek Şener