The Shadow and Truth, CaixaForum, Barcelona

Ergin Inan's 'Seated Figure' (1993)

“Mingling our own established traditions with that of the infidels will strip us of our purity and reduce us to being slaves.”

So says a 16th-century character in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, a novel that is so temptingly quotable when it comes to exhibitions of Turkish art that, as a reviewer, I tried to resist it.

In the end, though, after seeing this small, thought-provoking display at Barcelona’s CaixaForum, echoes of Pamuk’s tale are impossible to drown out. Turkey’s history supplies many of the themes any contemporary art scene could wish for, and anxiety around modernity and globalisation flows through this show in much the same way as fascination and hostility have long flowed, in both directions, across the Bosphorus.

Turkish art is booming. Istanbul now boasts around 200 contemporary art galleries, video artists such as Kutluğ Ataman and Köken Ergun enjoying major international recognition.

Yet this small selection of large paintings from the collection of the Central Bank of Turkey doesn’t necessarily fit snugly into the new image of Cool Anatolia. Entitled The Shadow and Truth, these works are mainly from the 70s, 80s and 90s, representing the output of an older generation. This lesser fame may shed light on the “Shadow” of the title (we’ll come to the “Truth” later), though painters such as Erol Akyavas and Canan Tolon are increasingly emerging from that shadow and into international auction houses and galleries such as this one.

As paintings, too, these pieces are also distanced from the noisier conceptual artworks of the Turkish art scene, which often centre on the pet topic of identity. Identity might also be a major theme here, but, frankly, it’s a real pleasure to contemplate it through the standalone, explanation-free language of paint.

A gorgeous picture from 1982 by Erol Akyavas welcomes the visitor on entering, the first of a total of 18 works. The show’s one-artist-per-piece format is sometimes frustrating, and it would have been nice to compare various paintings within a painter’s oeuvre. Even so, the grouping of just a few works, most of which are very large, is intense and rewarding.

Akyavas’s opening piece, Locus of Extremity, has an epic look about it and is dominated, appropriately enough, by turquoise. We could be making a low pass over the sea of Marmara: architectural details (stairs, crenelations) suggest some kind of fragmented history. From a distance the various patches of colour also suggest a cartoon dog.

Look closer, and the central blue square is embossed with tree and other vegetable forms, revealing the old miniaturist influences on this far-from-miniature canvas. Akyavas, born in 1932, didn’t, of course, just pull this synthesis of post-modernity and tradition out of a hat. In the 1940s and 50s, earlier Turkish artists went to Paris – including some of the older painters here such as the late Selim Turan – where they slowly built up a colloquy between lyrical abstraction and their own artistic roots.

Opening with Akyavas is a useful key to understanding this fusion, but looking for the Ottoman-in-everything is also a pitfall. Turkish artists have long felt patronised by such expectations: Parisian critics of the 1950s often sought the exotic in the work of the Turkish émigrés, only to tut in disappointment when they found the tachisme everyone else was doing.

Of course, excessive fear of seeming orientalist will taint the joy of a show like this. Openness to seeing painting and feeling its effects, regardless of styles or influences, seems to be the solution. Selim Turan’s untitled piece from 1970, for example, happily blends abstraction and an Islamic fascination with script. Here, the word is not so much being made flesh as erupting out of a singularity and enveloping us in a kind of calligraphic firework display.

Then there’s Ömer Uluç who plies the brush like a pencil. The colours of his Icon (1970), a pairing of fantastic, muscular clouds of bright lilacs, blues and yellows, certainly seem to recall Byzantine art. A lot of the enjoyment of seeing these pictures comes precisely from their colours and strength of line, and does seem to bear out a general truth: that abstraction for Europeans has always been linked with the avant-garde, but for Islamic cultures was part of tradition itself.

Other pieces here, though, reflect no discernible national or historical roots. In paint that has been trowelled on and sculpted, Mehmet Güleryüz’s neo-expressionist Untitled (1989) depicts sailors bending to the oars of a lifeboat, their faces contorted in terror, behind them the flames of what may be a sinking ship.

In Mithat Sen’s Body (1991), green cellular blobs swarm on the canvas, ”backlit” by strong reds. The blobs look like they are in a state of constant agglomeration and separation, a few little drips of paint occasionally escaping the glossy firmness of line. Schematic and sterile in reproduction, Body is one of those paintings that can only be seen in the flesh.

Istanbul established its first Biennial in 1987. It helped put Turkish art on the map, though some would say it also made it like everywhere else. The later pictures here certainly show an anxiety about cultural standardisation. While an untitled 1988 collage by Kemal Önsoy explores the flaking surfaces of the modern city, making links between urban graffiti and cave paintings, Canan Tolon (the second youngest artist of the collection) presents the modern city as a homogenised nightmare. Her 1991 collage is a nebulous, rusty stain disappearing into a smoggy sky.

Which brings us to the show’s title: The Shadow and Truth. “Shadow”, perhaps in the sense of Turkish painting being kept in the shadows. But the corresponding “Truth” sets up Platonic ideas of shadows on the wall of the cave: that the “truth” as we know it is merely a poor copy of the real, divine Truth.

Such ideas certainly fed into sufist Islam. We can imagine the 16th-century character from Pamuk’s novel influenced by such ideas, too, scandalised that the new European rules of perspective, in seeking to be “realistic”, presumed to know the hidden truth of the Divine. We might also imagine him surfacing in our own time: what would he make of the fact that western art long ago gave up on the Christian myth, looking east for a hotchpotch of stylistic and spiritual inspiration? What would he make of the enervated, polluted cityscapes of contemporary Turkish artists?

The last picture in the exhibition is Halil Akdeniz’s Anatolian Civilizations (1989). The canvas is divided vertically down the middle, the (western?) side emblazoned with the Greek letter Phi. Yet both sides of this monumental divide are different shades of the same muddy brown, as if modernity is an increasingly amorphous experience for Turk or Greek alike.

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