Biography
Erol Akyavaş made a series of lithographs in 1957 at age 25. He dedicated the work to Yunus Emre, a 13th-century poet considered one of the masters of Sufi literature. This folder of five black and white prints created in Cleveland, Ohio, is crucial to understanding his life and journey as an artist. The images reveal an ordinary yet fascinating detail of a nude female body, calligraphy forming a downward flow, a labyrinth placed among countless human heads, a tent set up in the shade of Ottoman miniatures like trees, and a wall formed out of light and dark cubic ink blobs resembling tightly stacked bricks on top of each other.
In 1951, Akyavaş enrolled in Ankara University's Faculty of Political Science to pursue his dream of becoming a diplomat. 1952, he attended the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts as a visiting student. In 1953, he followed the courses given by Fernand Léger at the artist’s atelier-école in Paris. In 1954, he moved to the USA to study architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), one of Bauhaus's new flourishing centres. This impressive list of educational institutions is sometimes interpreted as a class privilege. Being a child from a caring, wealthy, and intellectual family, Akyavaş had every means to focus on whichever subject he wanted to study. He seized upon these opportunities to diversify his interests. He believed not in a comprehensive education but in an instinctive curiosity. He was devoted to pursuing impossibilities instead of what was provided to him.
Akyavaş was a Mies Van Der Rohe student at the IIT, the last stop of his educational adventure. He complained the most about how Mies had made them steadfastly and repeatedly draw the bricks of an entire façade of a wall so that not even a single side or a corner line would cross over the other. Still, it was these walls that Akyavaş started depicting in his Yunus Emre series, followed by numerous other city walls, ramparts, labyrinths, and castles, all built brick by brick in his paintings for over half a century. Having founded his art on games of fear and power, he travelled through time as he depicted the Battle of Karbala and the Crusades, the Vietnam War and the Cuban Revolution, Palestine, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Akyavaş’s training on laying one brick on top of another also guided him about the notion of multilayered-ness he would incessantly pursue throughout his life. Numerous references from art history, from Ottoman gardens to Baroque cathedrals, overlapped in his works. He scrutinised what could be made with the material within his iconic box frames, where beads and bones coalesced and formed innumerable layers, and his blood-coloured linen passe-partouts from one end of the world were crowned with gold leaves from another. Akyavaş used collages and superimposed images in almost all his works, which was not simply an artistic technique but a worldview for him.
The collage aesthetics are most visible in the image from the Yunus Emre series. In this work, a labyrinth with knots as it exists was built not with bricks but woven with ropes in the middle of a sunny garden circumscribed with randomly placed heads on a dark background. The labyrinths of Akyavaş, who adopted Sufism towards the end of his life, represent this view. The destinations people want to arrive at in their inner journeys, the paths they choose to tread to reach these destinations, and the search for truth and meaning are reflected in his paintings.
The tents, one of the fundamental architectural elements of his artworks, are made of his fingerprints. When we look closely at the lines that imitate the natural vertical swing of the fabric of a tent, we encounter an essential trace of his identity: the lines on the skin of his fingertips. Once again, everything turns inwards; the basic and perhaps the first known shelter after the caves resides in our palms. The iconic Blue Tent, highlight of another set of lithographs, Miraçname, (1987, Paris), dominates the series with its deep colours and magnificence. The work seems to depict the retreat of the ‘passenger’ from this world as he traverses each refuge on his way and arrives in his inner shelter. The Arabic letter ‘Waw’ ( و). Waw and the letter alif ( ا) are two complicated aesthetic symbols to which Islamic iconography ascribes many meanings and secrets. After completing the printing process, Akyavaş hand-painted the Waw with a matte and velvety black colour on some of the editions of the Miraçname but also placed it differently almost every time. The graphic artist who supervised this meticulous work was Ilona Akyavaş. Erol Akyavaş met her and got married in 1956 in Ohio. She assisted him with many of his works.
The significance of specific Arabic letters and calligraphy, which Akyavaş first worked on in the Yunus Emre series, became particularly evident in 1959. The Museum of Modern Art acquired The Glory of the Kings from the exhibition Akyavaş opened in New York the same year. In this work and his early calligraphic works, the composition rather than the meaning and significance of the letters come to the fore. He was painting like an archaeologist who documents the stack of human bones from an ancient tomb. Hence, his early compositions, usually interpreted as the tughra of a sultan who has just declared his reign or the flag of the sworders drawn against the tents, were piles of spots and stains. Calligraphy, which later disappeared from his works, returned with the clouds in the 1980s and only then gained its legibility.
Akyavaş’s clouds, equally iconic as his tents, are always stacked and calligraphic; they sometimes represent a threat hanging in the city’s sky, sometimes they are the sea waves in bloody wars, and sometimes fingerprints. The larger and more discernible Arabic letters, which he began to insert into these his drawings in the mid-1980s, become a boat on a turbulent sea, a wall encircling an unguarded tent, or the sun scorching the sky worse than the wars tearing apart the earth. Over time, these letters would proliferate and articulate with each other to turn into a text, and Akyavaş’s works called Ferman (edict) would emerge. Therefore, Waw in Miraçname, which chronologically appears in the middle of this artistic journey, lies at the heart of Akyavaş’s imagery. Next to the bloodstains in red in his Ferman, the pitch-black Waw in Miraçname adds another layer, intensifying the work historically and visually.
