The artist focuses on the minutest of spaces, in the slightest fractions of time, and through those realms that border on pure introspection, they manifest grand expanses and figments of timelessness that are able to reach into the heart of any unsuspecting individual and grab at the pulsing veins of humanity. Whether it is the impressions of lettered ink on a page or the brushes of a painted palette on a canvas, the creative mind gravitates to the microcosms of reality in search of metaphors that open to the ends of the unknown multiverse. It is under that subtle though penetrating light where such artists as Aylin Zaptçıoğlu find surety, grace, and with at least a few strokes of luck, enough to deepen the visual narrative that is passed down through the generations to only the worthiest of skilled successors.

After cutting her teeth in the shallow pool of those green and often yellow artists who are truly distinguished from the groundswells of the up-and-coming as a 2008 graduate of Mimar Sinan University, the most prestigious fine arts school in the country, Aylin Zaptçıoğlu experienced new depth in her relationship with her professor and mentor, Neşe Erdok, a strong and masterful woman known for her innovations in contemporary portraiture, as she single-handedly changed the aesthetics of human representation in Turkish painting. She saw a mutual light in the eye of Zaptçıoğlu, who, while still in her 20s, went on to become the center of four successful solo shows at Evin Art Gallery in Istanbul's swanky Bebek district, a place relatively sequestered in terms of its sociocultural immediacy to the constant international march of art lovers at the southern tip of the Bosporus and the fiery upticks of studio labors from the tight-knit networks of contemporary artists hard at work as they look out over the Anatolian coasts of the Sea of Marmara in the wildly popular neighborhoods of Kadıköy.

Among her contemporaries of the early Republic era, Erdok attained a monumental standing in Turkish art, lauded alongside the preeminent modern ceramicist Füreya Koral in the national spotlight after studying literature and history in Spain and fresco painting and stained glass in Paris at leading academies like the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts. In 1981 she began teaching at Mimar Sinan, a post that has been instrumental to the emergence of many new and promising names in the highly concentrated art world of Istanbul. Inside the second-floor gallery at Öktem&Aykut, which began four years ago as a core establishment in the local arts scene of the largest Turkish metropolis, co-founder Tankut Aykut gazes into the works of Zaptçıoğlu to discuss with lucid warmth on the influential artistry of Neşe Erdok.

Almost within earshot of the constant clicks from the all-seeing cameras under the global attraction in the window, Aykut remarks on the reputation of Erdok as a creative descendent of the surrealist painter Arshile Gorky, an Armenian-American whose work continues to be discussed by the international media, as he remains at the center of controversies surrounding the obscurity of his otherwise marred reputation, which by all logical reasoning should have in fact catapulted him to the height of worldwide fame when Jackson Pollock stood in the limelight that was, to many, meant for him. Up a nondescript stoop on the colorful Portakal Street around the corner from the 14th century Genoese-built Galata Tower, the niche airs of the Istanbul art world resound in spectrums as diverse as the characters that have passed through its doors and halls to stare into color and texture and visualize novel ideas.

On Friday, the shrewd, curatorial duo, Tankut Aykut and Doğa Öktem will begin a permanent move to Şişhane by christening the new place off Meşrutiyet Avenue not far from Soho House with an opening to feature the works of the Belgian-Turkish artist Sinan Logie, whose signature black-and-white, architectural abstractions on paper have clothed the bare walls of Öktem&Aykut in the past with his uncannily intuitive, postmodern originality. Easing into the transition over tea at the gallery office, the ceaselessly ambitious pair sit where they have long welcomed guests under blanched ceilings in a century building down the street from Neve Shalom Synagogue once erected by a Jewish patriarch who had moved upstream from Balat after earning his keep among the last generation of Ottoman subjects to join the ranks of the more affluent Europeanized minorities in the late 19th century.

Despite bemoaning the fate of Turkey in the latter two years after opening Öktem&Aykut where they have come to experience a significant downturn in positive, international cultural integration in contrast to the recent past, they are leaning into the sharp corners, as they go out of the floundering touristic neighborhood in style, encouraged by the unfailing, universal duality that Zaptçıoğlu captures through her scintillating oeuvre. She has, according to Aykut, advanced considerably from her earlier works. "Good, Bad, Cold, Hot" marks a turning point as she displays a special capacity for delivering the essence of life in the image of its ultimate flowering. Eight untitled pieces, including two sculpture works and oil paintings on canvas, are on the main gallery floor, with various other works collected out of view. One of her finest pieces is hung in the compact office at Öktem&Aykut, bearing certain resemblances to the art of Frida Kahlo as they both recurrently expose the vulnerable, nude woman, with child, over a reflective pool that she touches with vegetal, mammalian tendrils, contemplating the mythos of her psyche.

Ambling about the bijou interior, Aykut expounds on the art of Zaptçıoğlu, relating her affinities to cohort Leyla Gediz, which is especially clear in her sole ceramic work, with its tufts of petrified flame exuding the character of its making. To roving eyes with a weakness for critical comparison, the supernatural primitivism of Henri Rousseau speaks through her work, as is particularly visible in her painting depicting the spiny trunk and thin leaves of a tropical tree cast against a dimly lit grey, indigo background. It has motifs that appear on her other canvases, asserting the qualities of earth, as one of the primary elements of mythical creation. Another of her earth scenes is deeply influenced by the portraiture of Erdok, as she presents the defeat of a monster who could exist in the children's book "Where the Wild Things Are." Immersed in a near-opaque pool swimming with a serpentine monster, her embedded portraits surface anew from the element of water bearing a visage of gorgeous innocence, a sentiment that runs parallel with her traces of Naive post-impressionism.

Visionary in her talent for fusing the psychological complexities of human expression with the mythological forms of the archaic, preliterate imagination, she sculpted clay, plaster, and glue over a wooden plinth to shape the two-faced head of a chimera, one born of the fog that thickens where history fades over that bold shroud of early Greek civilization still worn by the West as a matter of cultural pride in the philosophical triumph of reason. And yet, the artist and specifically the paintings of Zaptçıoğlu appear as in a vision from beyond, reminding the obscurest corners of the brain that there are greater passions and realities that snake and unwind through the passages of every thought. In a distinctly broad canvas likened to the expansive oils of Tarık Töre, the chimera returns, transmogrified under her hand from its midsection into the upper body of a gazelle as it lays shrieking and clouded under an environment destroyed by the element of fire. Its setting is inspired by Çıralı village in the Lycian region on the southwest coast of Turkey where permanent gas vents pervade a burning landscape under peaks named after the Olympus and Chimera of old.