AYKUT AYDOĞDU

Turkish artist and graphic designer Aykut AydoGdu sees the world through Alice’s looking glass.

By tapping into his subconscious, Aydoğdu’s surreal portraits of hauntingly seductive women defy reality — and are somehow made even more stunning. In one portrait, titled High Hopes, a blindfolded woman, with wavy, brown hair and full lips, stands alone in a valley. Her head is a balloon that she holds onto with a thin string. In another portrait, luminescent jellyfish swim up a woman’s swanlike neck; her body is a deep, dark ocean.

Aydoğdu revels in the fact that surrealism is purposefully obtuse. His art is meaningful and metaphoric but never didactic. He wants each viewer to come up with their interpretation. But, most importantly, he wants to make you feel something, to stir emotions most of us hide away: fear, anxiety, loneliness, heartache. Unbridled yet elegant, Aydoğdu’s art makes surrealism both sexy and profound.

“I was fond of drawing and painting since childhood,” says Aydoğdu. Born in Ankara, Turkey, he now resides in Istanbul, the country’s most populous city. “Like every child, I loved watching cartoons. They inspired me a lot.” At the age of five, while enjoying the cartoon versions of The Mask and X-Men (two shows known for their inventiveness), he was inspired to make illustrations. His artistic ambitions were fortunately supported by his parents. “I was lucky,” he says. “My parents and everyone around me supported me and helped me achieve my dream of becoming an artist.”

Although Aydoğdu was drawn to art at an early age, he struggled when choosing his area of expertise. “For a long, long time, I was thinking about doing animation or sculpture,” he says. “My interests eventually shifted but finding the one thing that I wanted to do took time.”

While still searching for his artistic voice, he honed his skills (and paid the bills) as a freelance graphic designer. Aydoğdu’s years as a designer improved his artwork. “They nurture and inspire each other,” he says. “Working in graphic design made my illustrations and technique better.”

But he had greater ambitions. Inspired by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt and Belgian surrealist René Magritte, Aydoğdu began to create reality-bending artwork. “Klimt’s romanticism and Magritte’s minimalism inspired me a lot,” says Aydoğdu. “I always try to emphasize these elements in my work.”

With Klimt, Aydoğdu shares his penchant for symbolism and his ability to capture the inner and outer splendor of women. Both artists depict the female form as being dreamlike, almost fluid, where a woman’s elegance is what makes them sexy. With Magritte, Aydoğdu embraces his predilection for the absurd and his skillful juxtaposition of disparate elements. Magritte famously covered a distinguished gentleman’s face with a polished green apple; Aydoğdu, on the other hand, obstructs an attractive woman’s face with a sea-green butterfly. Aydoğdu’s artwork is the perfect marriage between his inspirations, Klimt and Magritte.

On the surface, portraits would seem limiting because the human face is always the central focus. Aydoğdu’s, however, are complex (partly due to his experience as a graphic designer) and incredibly expressive; he understands that striking facial features are key to capturing his subject’s emotions. To achieve this, he often enlarges the eyes, allowing the viewer a glimpse into the subject’s mind. For added appeal, he elongates the neck, pinches the nose to perfection, and, as a trademark, places a lit cigarette in their mouth. Even without surrealism, his portraits would be mesmerizing, but his unique ability to reflect reality through a funhouse mirror grants his art its power.

“I work mostly on portraits and combine them with surrealism because surrealism is the best way to express specific notions,” he says. “To combine facial expressions with surrealism empowers the emotions and ideas.” Aydoğdu uses surrealism to communicate big ideas, but he is tight-lipped about what much of his artwork means.

“I think the most distinctive feature of Aykut’s work is that he always leaves the interpretation to the viewer,” says Şahika Özarslan, Aydoğdu’s girlfriend of nearly two years. Özarslan is a public relations executive at an agency and a former journalist. She previously worked as an arts and culture news correspondent. The first time she saw Aydoğdu’s work was a poster he illustrated for a play. She recalls being immediately “inspired and impressed.”

“Everyone can find something familiar yet undefinable in his art,” she says, “and the feedback he receives confirms this.”

Özarslan is right that Aydoğdu’s artwork is often “undefinable,” inspiring passionate interpretations, a clear sign that it’s effective. In The Saint, a woman prays before a nuclear wasteland. She wears a decimated city as a crown; her gold earrings are bombs. Amid the slew of Instagram comments remarking on the portrait’s colors, composition, and “coolness,” one commenter simply wrote #stop_war_on_yemen while another “I can guess her name is Syria.”

“Surrealism is a practical way for me to simultaneously say something directly and indirectly,” he says. “It gives space and interpretation to the viewer and thus my art becomes something that works both ways: a collective of emotions and understanding.”

But when asked if he prefers for his art to say something or for it to make the viewer feel something, Aydoğdu says he hopes for both. “Every time I publish a new piece, I receive lots of different comments on how it made the viewer feel,” he says. “This is actually what I want. The viewers should have their own interpretations. This is the best way to inspire them.”

In another portrait on Aydoğdu’s Instagram, a Black woman, in a crisp white button-up,  wears a wide-brim hat adorned with the American flag. Her glasses are handcuffs. The image inspired singer-songwriter Erykah Badu to simply comment “Damn.”

“I enjoy the comments when they imply a personal connection and are about their current state of mind, their ethnicity, and culture,” says Aydoğdu. “That gives me a rich diversity of points of view, which enriches my art.”

Recently, Özarslan has noticed a change in Aydoğdu’s art: it has “evolved into something more subtle.” Unlike the political weightiness of The Saint, his latest series of portraits, Waves, is introspective, even raw. The series depicts moments of loneliness, depression, and anxiety, exposing the feelings that, in times of darkness, threaten to drown us.

First Wave depicts a cresting wave nearly capsizing a small boat as it sails across a vulnerable woman’s face. Her despair is palpable. “To combine portraits with waves, in an aesthetic way, without deconstructing the composition, is technically difficult,” he says. “Waves are not easy to work with, but at the same time, they are a great way to reflect emotions.”

Unlike many of his other illustrations, Aydoğdu is comfortable commenting on the meaning of Waves.

“It is concentrated on self-emancipation,” he says, “trying to liberate oneself but having a hard time being stuck in modern life’s rules, forms, and habits.”

With Waves, Aydoğdu has come unstuck. He has creatively matured. Although significantly more understated than his previous portraits, he has instead journeyed inwardly to the other side of the looking glass, where he has discovered a world that looks and feels like ours.

This story was written for Playboy in June 2019 but never published.