Paintings by Ipong Purnama Sidhi
At Ganesha Gallery, Four Seasons Resort, Jimbaran Bay Tel: 701010
Like his deliciously nervous paintings which are dominated by anxious and agitated lines and extremely bright and iridescent colors, the career of the central Javanese artist, Ipong Purnama Sidhi, has been long and fluid. Painter, graphic-artist, illustrator, curator and book-designer, Ipong studied at Yogyakarta’s prestigious Fine Arts Academy from 1975 to 1981, and, since then, he has exhibited in Indonesia and abroad, and won national and international praise. In 1996 Ipong also studied printmaking at the Royal University College of Fine Arts, in Stockholm, Sweden.
In his current exhibition, ‘Emotional Allegories’, each canvas is dominated by human figures or faces, which display a distinct emotional state. Interaction with others, and symbolic peripheral images, are used to create virtual allegories. Ipong’s technique, which can be seen in works such as ‘Drunken Bagong’, ‘Invisible-Visible’, ‘Jakarta Roulette’ and ‘Searching for Sleep’, is strongly influenced by graphic art sensibilities, with extensive use of black outlines over lively colors. The lines define space and movement within the picture plane. As drawn the lines are not solid but imbued with nervous energy that causes the whole to vibrate. Handwritten texts are sometimes added to his work, and these reinforce the visuals as well as the messages he aims to convey.
Ipong’s canvases, for him, become emotional and ideological fields, touching upon the problems of people and humanity itself. When creating his characters they almost nearly have the same face. They are flat, with eyes and brows which are alike! Many of these characters resemble clown faces. The impression is that ‘clowns’ are an allegory for life that is made light, without burden. By bringing up people and their problems, Ipong is free to take on the world. To load his sharp criticisms to social conditions. His decorative figures are convincing metaphors and images for clumsy, banal and ironic urbanities. Reflecting on the characters that Ipong creates, the viewer is able to see a mirror, and to have a good laugh at themselves, and the world around them. Ipong’s work discloses a very humorous and critical side of the Javanese psyche.
Punching the Devil
Digital Prints, Photographs and Sculpture by Rodney Glick.
At Gaya Art Space, Jl. Raya Sayan, Ubud. Tel: 979252.
With these latest sculptures from his ongoing ‘Everyone’ series, Rodney Glick, an Australian artist resident in Bali, presents us with a strange and intriguing cultural mix. The works are loosely based on Indian Hindu paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries. Glick has staged certain scenarios depicted in these paintings using real life models, and these scenarios have then been photographed and digitally altered. The resulting manipulated images, such as ‘Everyone No. 75 Print’, are exhibited as framed digital prints in their own right. These composite images also serve as source material for the Balinese woodcarvers and painters, who have then created the sculptures, such as ‘Everyone No. 17 and 35’, with Glick providing direction and making the artistic decisions. Consequently, the process by which Glick creates his work is very much on display. This is a process which probably was most readily brought to fame by the American conceptual artist Jeff Koons.
Throughout Glick’s work we feel we are in the presence of something significant. Non-Hindus are surprised to discover that Hindu gods and goddesses, while being divine, also manifest the fears, doubts and other psychological states that constitute our own characters. Though there is a strangeness about these works, and an element of humor that comes from the juxtaposition of ancient Hindu subject matter with contemporary models, there is certainly no intention to mock or make fun of an ancient belief system. Rather, something universal is implied. These sculptures, and other works from the ‘Everyone’ series, seduce us through the fineness of their form and the skill of their making. They intrigue us because of the mix of ancient and modern, religious and secular, Eastern and Western. Finally, they invite us to confront deep and basic states of mind that we all experience but that we might prefer to leave alone. We might find some comfort in knowing that the states of mind we share with the rest of humanity we also share with the gods.
Also on display are excerpts from Rodney Glick’s ‘Defaced’ series. In this series Glick has done some violence to found family photographs and their memories, and the real begins to resemble fiction. In images such as ‘Defaced Turned Head’, Glick has taken photographs and scratched out many of the faces that made these characters familiar and known. In so doing the people are cast adrift, rendered anonymous, their outward gaze cut off. Their relationship to the viewer is severed, and they are no longer individuals but representatives of anyone or everyone. For Rodney Glick to erase the faces is to allow imagination free reign, for the real features can now only be guessed at and new stories can be made up. To do so is to signal, too, the movement of memory into history, and the decline of the concrete and known subject matter into the anonymous past.
With his use of ‘defaced’ photographs, digital manipulated images and sculpture created under instruction by artisans, Rodney Glick brings up a very pertinent question: Just what constitutes Art in the present era of technological advancement? But, hasn’t Art always been like that?
E-mail: artwords2004@yahoo.com.au
