The encounter with the pictures of Fϋsun Akbaygil is also a contact with oriental cultures, a step over the ordinary reality. In fact if we look at her pictures, so different for subject, composition, structure and symbolism, we unconsciously accept that the basic idea of these images brings us over the real time and space. The landscapes and the characters go back to the memory of a rich tradition, to the Asiatic trips with their strong smells, to violet and ochre landscapes, yellow deserts, orange suns, red and blue horses together with even more astonishing knights. The extended use of symbols, often birds as lamps in the knights' arms, refers to a geometric creation of the picture which is made up by the various dimensions of the reality. The figures, so similar, organized in accordance to a certain rhythm, are different only because of the background of the landscapes through which they flow to indefinite places. Maybe' to Cordoba, maybe nowhere, to a time-Iess world. Frequent are the subjects of knights, shamans and animals. They get out of the reality with their unreal colors, with dense brushstrokes which recall the space: they move slowly through landscapes and paths, at the border between our world and the transcendental dimension. These landscapes of intense atmosphere and mystic spaces, human figures and animals, irresistibly recall the colorful world of Sergej Paradzanov, in his movie "The color of pomegranate". The strong colors, especially the pomegranate color, the violet and the yellow, in the unusual world of Paradzanov where everything moves and stands at the same time, touch on each other in the spreading mysticism that comes from the symbols. Frequent are also the winged figures. They rarely raise from the ground and we don't really know whether they have just landed or they are going to take off. They often announce or bring news and the enigma is not in the its premonition but rather in the possibility that they could suddenly fly away or eternally stand in the same place. Sometime the figure is her daughter, ready to leave with her open wings. Sometime is Aladin or Superman, but always fixed in the picture, nailed in the time and in the space, and yet ready to fly. This dynamism of the departure- it does not depend on us- creates an unusual drama in the relationship with the time, which is static and slips out of our control. Fusun explains how these pictures were born: "I have a constant need to transfer into a myth or a symbol the events that I saw and I felt with special emotion. For example an ordinary event, such as the image of my daughter running to me and bringing a letter just delivered by the postman, appeared to me as the image of a messenger of ancient times. That event becomes a symbol, a moment saved from the oblivion." Her paintings don't depend on the light, but on the need to give back to the colors their elementary intensity. The contrasts that come out create impetuous and dramatic visual connections. The metaphoric sedimentation of the time of human life is present in the entire cycle of her pictures with the ancient "nisan" (gravestones), coming from different cultures and traditions, where men need to express their feelings through artistic means.

All these stones are more sculptures in the space than paintings and we perceive them, as it happens with our steak, like naif painting: the images of the life of man, his job, the objects of his daily life, as well as the symbols and the metaphors though which he tried to reach the absolute silence over the life. Maybe the most interesting pictures of this cycle are those with the image of the ram, who later, coming off from the stone, will start a new cycle and establish a psychological relation with man. The ram is the symbol of sacrifice, Kurban. He appears stunned and frightened in front of the threatening presage, as man, in his docile impotence, stands horrified in front of the drama of death. Particularly impressive are the pictures with groups of rams, where she painted the fear itself in a very strong and expressive way. In some pictures with completely different subjects, some small figures and animals seem to move together as they do in the oriental carpets, like offers to the shaman women, in deep contrast with the figures of the big paintings. . In the process of creating the picture the events are turned into surfaces, separated from each other by pronounced lines or brushstrokes as scratches of color. As soon as the picture is finished in a figurative sense, the second phase starts with a process that aims to hide the picture itself. Fusun explains the process of escaping from the picture "The red horse escaped from the painter": "My pictures that look as abstract paintings hide a concrete composition. They try to hide, to run away from me I need to add to my concrete compositions a hidden and mystic dimension. That picture I was working on for hours and days, I suddenly feel the need to hide it, to make it mysterious " Fusun does not seem to be linked to a precise style. She changes the style according to the events: landscapes, people, passions that she feels in the moment of creating the picture: "Those who look at my paintings for the first time have the impression that they have been painted by different painters. These changes of style are in fact the result not only of the continuous mental process of creation, but also of a different level of strength of my feelings in the moment of the birth of the picture". As her compatriot Orhan Pamuk says, the style is our ego and our vanity: "The style is the mistake ....A perfect design does need neither style nor signature .... " (My name is Red). Fusun, bringing into her pictures marks of different events and civilizations , created a world with an only apparently naive sincerity, but in fact capable to take from life everything she turned into a picture, using her knowledge just in the right way needed by the creation process If we look at her paintings in their essentiality we could find ourselves without time landmarks, even if we understand that time is alive in ali her paintings as a specific and temporary moment. We equally feel the lightness with which Fusun moves in different and intense mystic spaces. But all these diversities are connected through a pictorial unity, where human beings and animals seem to be outstanding in the way of Chagall, independently from their gravity or the choice of colors. In her best pictures, both for subject and composition, we recognize a kind of poetics, where memory, presage and symbolism allow us, in an unusual harmony, to perceive the beauty as a catharsis, as a vision of calm and silence.

Vesna Ljubic