To be conscientious to a fault
It is said that our first experiences are always special: both melancholy and passion are nourished by the human soul in this way; I don't know if this is true or not but in painting, when you come face to face for the first time with the image of an existence in whose reality you believe this is certainly the case. The first time you encounter a painting is always good and always special. The person who has experienced it recognizes the moment when reality and representation weigh one another and wish they could exchange places.
In this surprisingly relative enormity of a world nourished on solitude, or in this comparative wealth of dreams and aspirations that present such variation from one person to the next, the power of expression of the wrist and the memory that compete with one another in their use, that patiently and completely design, I met this young woman who believes in it and has the wealth of accumulation to be able to deconstruct and reconstruct it, by seeing her paintings for the first time.
Now, this sensory digestion takes time; because I saw them before you did, these paintings that are so sincere that they might be called improvisations, it would be wrong to haughtily make unrestrained judgments and to dogmatize and counsel or advise you Because it has not been very long since I became acquainted with the paintings of Ayça Tüylüoğlu, paintings which she abstains from even signing, filled with this solidified dream plastique, these autonomous spaces, this fountain of material, her style brings to mind Virginia Woolf, Tezer Özlü, Nilgün Marmara and even Tori Amos in the same instant.
We may be newly acquainted, but in order to pass into the World in her paintings, just as Ayça went before me, I must attempt to follow the intuitive path her pupils have traced on the canvas, stare until they have moved out of their orbits, then begin to see them, and attempt for a much longer time to understand them.
A city-born, extremely vigorous, skillful young woman, creating these spatial paintings in the most individual and intimate, self-sacrificing and self-confident brush strokes, touching and weaving the multiplicity of meanings of the World she inhabits, bringing such events as the ‘hope chest’ into the World of the 21st century, indicating at first the possibility of tenderness and hope and the possibility of its permanence, but unable to guarantee it, a desolate yet hopeful texture that contains the marks of craftsmanship.
The painter's experienced, searching style, whose dimensions and expressions reach to the open horizon as far as the eye can see, gives me the inescapable feeling that I have fallen pray to an ambush in the face of the opposite sex.
You may very well find this peculiar: that is entirely possible, of course. Perhaps for the first time when looking at a painting I have experienced a curiosity, even jealousy and desperation that could lead to the question, "I wonder, if I were a woman, what would I have felt and seen?" No, I say this to the paintings too: coming as eye-to-eye with them as I can, what I have seen in these paintings, but have 'undergone' as I observed them, this whiff of macabre distress in the face of the physical and emotional body, I want to describe to you the pressure I felt. I assure you, paintings, it is my belief that the language expressed through the brush of a young woman who does not remain unmoved by the existing World and the pain of the gender she represents can only be responded to in a new language:
Each of these paintings is a ménage of portraits for me. I feel that in each of them a part of me has separately grown and grown up, formed according to a difficult, a very difficult World. Painting has the power of rehabi(li)tation; there is a belief and potential for establishing a new life in these 'improving' but infinitely tired images.
There is the inestimable emptiness and intimacy of the abstract but optimistic dream pause when a fevered child whose illness is intensifying allows himself to relax. To perceive the existing world again, to attempt to interpret it again in coordination with both our emotion and intellect, to open mankind’s eyes wide to life… there is a sort of melancholic courage here.
In these paintings can be found the solitary but boundless truth of the silvery, candle-lighted yearning that carried the Little Prince all the way to the stars. There are the gazes of so many forlorn little ones who grew up but never became princes or princesses. Yes, up until today people may never have traveled to a single star. But neither has anyone, up until today, ever traveled to a painting and gotten lost there.
But this does not prevent people from looking at paintings as they look at the stars, and becoming lost in hope. It is true that I am perhaps blindly following these paintings. But while they are all watching me, what could be more natural to do? In the face of all the world’s contradictions and paradoxes, how else to express with such boundlessly conscientious acceptance, more openly, more defenselessly, more honorably and nakedly, the sacred and bedeviling image of human responsibility than in these paintings?
Evrim Altuğ, January 2007