PAINTINGS OF HIS PERSONAL MYTHOLOGY
Daniel Doublier
Do you know Onay Akbaş, the painter? Akbaş, with his conquering attitude, twinkling eyes, beard,
philosophical Akbaş? He lives and works in Paris, in a place not so far away from Bastille, the symbol of
civil rebellion. There, a unique artist, making the colours dance a waltz with his brush, soaking with
saffron yellow, cadmium orange cobalt blue, magenta red, verones green and a thousand more colours.
What else do I know? The studio is pulling apart the dirty greys of winter in the sky. Outdoors, there is a
weather that pushes down your head, joyless, damp, shitty. But indoors, all over the walls, we see
amazing explosions and blasts, spreading around from astonishing colourful sparks. Nevertheless, the
eye doesn't get lost. There is an exceptional integrity on every canvas. This painting, neither
impressionist nor decorative, strikes you in the heart, swathing the most sensitive areas of your
childhood which had escaped from your memory. There are puppet masters / Butterfly collectors /
Laughing kids, dogs with long noses / Some are flying / Angry kids / Cornered clouds and the sun, rolled
over the earth / Smiles that trick the sullen faces / Then, big flowers, surprised at their existence there.
All of these are overlapped, scuffling in an original space with no aspect of expressionism, realism or
classical painting. It's more of a narrative, fully filled space; a space created by a wonderful composition,
composed of a web of alive interest and relationships only processed by solid, indestructable plastic
approach and rationality, the space, entwined with a thin fabric of disruption, helped by intersecting and
meeting lines. For that matter, just like in his academic drawings that he sticks to his wildly colourful
paintings (his earlier works), this esthetic logic brings together many conflicting elements that often
fiddle with the memory of the painter. This logic, which follows the artist on his lonely journey in his
own way, is such a logic that the importance of style and colour only submits to the density of painted
excitements. This distemperate stretch of the figure below the painting, or another one waving his
hands like a puppet collapsed on his own joints is not that important, even their powerful lines and the
directions that they point contributes to the unique architecture of the painting. And we find ourselves
in the net of his personal mythology, in which he tells us about ourselves, full of life, like a brawling
source. In that case, if you don't know about Akbaş's paintings, you should see them. The choir that will
cleanse your soul will repel any pitch black thoughts that you may have. Akbaş's paintings are the real
medicine of melancholy.