A “BRAVEHEART” AFTER FANTASY

Painting means life to Perihan Altanlar. She has always been devoted to painting with great love, which has become as natural as breathing and life’s most essential necessity for her. She does not run after any art movement. If I had to describe her in a few words, I would call her an “independent artist” as Perihan only creates paintings of her own in a brave, free, and independent way. She has been sincere and determined in her attitude since the beginning of her production. Her abstractions, in which she predominantly embraces the watercolour technique, greet us with blazonry. Her paintings do not have a focal point. Every component that forms her painting pulls the viewer inside. She does not depict anything she has not lived and absorbed. Her paintings produce a poetic and fictional impact as the reflection of her own internal innocence and plain beauty.

Time and location are not important for Perihan. She works and produces no matter what the circumstances are. She pulls away from the expectations of the materialistic dimensions and becomes integrated with her displays of the love of earth, nature, and mankind. She presents her implementations, in different expressions and dimensions, to her community without isolation and over-thinking to stand on her own feet. For her, a café or a restaurant= (besides an art gallery) may be very valuable for a painting to share, so that it can touch people and reach its aim of appealing to a wider audience. Due to this approach, she does not perceive art as being disconnected from life and considers every opportunity to reach people. 

The artist puts the training she received from various workshops to one side. She is aware of herself. She is awake to the fact that the education process is just a tool. Having discovered her inner potential, she applies a colourful, sincere and naive manner of telling to her work and pulls away from the academic norms and discipline. She mirrors the purity of her heart without getting over-involved in intellectuality. She, practically, transforms her carefully filtered surrounding into a fictional heaven garden. 

A limited cultural environment is not the only food source for her. She constantly travels. She breathes the air in and absorbs different sized cities, towns, and villages; from the very big metropolis to a rural village. When comprehended from the artist’s perspective and blended with the aesthetic view, such areas detach from objectivity and turn out to be filled with fantasy while being abstracted on her brush.   

She does not have any concerns whatsoever about stylisation. The most important factor that creates this situation is that she keeps the passion of pursuit and finding the new always alive inside her. Her every work is different from the earlier. The important point is her transfer of pure integration on a two dimensional painting with sincerity. For this reason, in her paintings, nature sometimes finds itself in asymmetric placed abstract forms and sometimes on her enthusiastic brush strokes of which the musical rhythm we feel.

There are also some works where she does not stick by her earlier days with moral links. Things she went through, life experiences and the feeling of transcendence take the artist to a showdown with the works she displayed in the earlier periods. In the phases when she feels this emotion intensively, she cuts her works into pieces and blends and transforms them into a new consciousness. Afterwards, she displays integrated images by sticking those pieces on very big surfaces in clip art, where we can digest the past ego and the details of her experience step by step.

Perihan’s lively and sharing personality, her love and passion for art , pulls her away from forms,  the art is in  'herself'. , The fact that she can integrate her productions with every moment of her own life demonstrates her difference as a brave and original artist. 

Serkan Azeri

Researcher in Art History- Art Critic