FANTASTICAL POWER - Walter van Oel

FANTASTICAL POWER - Walter van Oel
Plaza Indonesia
4 - 30 September 2009
Lantai 1 E# 10 - 11

HIGHLIGHT AFTER WORD

The work of Walter Van Oel appears as a shining star amidst a galaxy of colour marked by contrasts that are never allowed to dominate one over the other: all visual elements occupy the same roles and positions. There is almost no visual element that carries a supporting or accompanying role in the name of continuity.

It is as though our eyes are unable to keep up with our perceptions. The resultant sensuality forces our eyes to view as if in a "raw state". We are unable to view with “eyes that perceive”. This “raw state” at the same time contrasts with “basic state”. The eye in its “raw state” is the eye which at a certain level has the power to negotiate visually (no longer 'basically'), but has not yet reached the ability to see, as it were, ripened form (no particular mode of perception having yet become active).

This kind of field of vision comes about because the visual reality in the works of Oel does not attempt to embroil us in a particular story, or lure us into a particular narrative. Oel does not construct text based on our collective consciousness of a thing, even if he does feature public icons such as Marilyn Monroe, Mao Tse Tung, dragons or shadow puppets. Oel does not aim to arouse perception through the use of these icons, rather he features them as things on which to hang the movement from “the perceiving eye” to the “non-perceiving eye”.

Seeing is ultimately the moment at which we meet and react to a work biologically, and experience it as a thing negotiated by our senses.

It is difficult to find a cultural reason why Oel features these public icons. The search for justifications itself sets in motion the wheels of narration that force us to try and understand the artistic approach taken by Van Oel using ordinary modes of perception. We will inevitably be influenced by the uncontrollability of these wheels as they move us to some universal understanding, without obliging us to interpret Oel's works on their own terms; the moment at which we can truly flow with the works will have been lost.

This restriction is more apparent when Van Oel uses a non-perceptional approach that effectively paralyses our “perceiving eyes”. Often these paralysed eyes of ours can be forced into perceiving with the use of heavy forms, round forms (circular and oval), or calligraphy that mimics block forms, including red and yellow as representative of certain cultures. However, once again, such impressions offer no way to save our inherent perceptive way of seeing.

The works of Walter Van Oel bring our eyes firmly to the border between that which we know and that which we do not know. Oel places a very solid frame around this border not only through the size of his paintings, which are generally quite large, but also through the literal framing of the paintings - a feature that forces us to stand at the break between the visual reality of the canvas, and that while lies outside the canvas. At this border, there is a sense of movement between the inner and outer worlds - the canvas and that which lies without.

The movement thus created in turn becomes the force that drives us to flow along with that which we see. It also leaves behind the possibility of competition between the world outside the canvas and the world within it - a latent conflict brought about when the perceiving eye is thrown into confusion by the mechanism of signs. This “flow” happens as a kind of “after word”; the river flows as a kind of “after water”.

How can this kind of restriction, present in the paintings of Oel, force us into a state of flow rather than throwing us abruptly from one place to another? Or is the border between the two worlds a kind of cliff from which we are pushed? It seems that the flow occurs as we as we see the paintings not with ideological eyes, but with raw vision.

Let us consider the visual reality of Oel's work. Reality 1: Block forms or circular forms that exist not in relation to other visual support (background is plain white). Reality 2: Objects and their backgrounds all appear in the same colour. Objects are formed through the use of texture and are without dimension. Reality 3: A combination of realities 1 & 2. Oel has a tendency to avoid trickling and splattering effects. Reality 4: Objects are placed within a transparent foreground colour, like the undeveloped negative of a photographic portrait. This colouring is like a curtain of colour that is meant to act both as a foreground as well as a backdrop, with the object hidden or sandwiched between the two.

The sheer size of the paintings affords a space that does true justice to the visual reality within it. If size were reduced, the galaxy of colour and Oel's paintings - forming as they do a clearly visible planet - would be less able to express the graphic politics inherent in their visual reality. For some reason, when we experience forms on such a grand scale, there is a greater chance that we will be swept along with the work.

Oel's visual strategy involves the eradication of narrative opportunities that might support or stimulate our own personal references. Indeed, the works give the impression that they can lift, as it were, these personal references of ours, in an "eye opening" manner that makes the works particularly attractive to us. However, the eye thus opened by these references is made powerless, wandering, or even running panic-stricken from one form to the next, never able to find an escape from the narrative in this search for the satisfaction of sensory desire.

Through this visual strategy, highlights from the works appear as "after words", and this represents a visual grammar that brings into play political graphics: The paintings no longer rely for effect on pieces of structural narrative. The visual grammar works in a simple manner (much like the Haiku of traditional Japanese poetry), understandable as icons - even more accessible, perhaps, than the icons we see these days on our computer desktops.

Highlight After Word is politically graphic in so far as it strictly limits visual narrative to itself only. Oel's paintings are visually iconic in that they stimulate our senses through their optical balance of size, colour and light. Using this visual strategy the works no longer compete on the aesthetic battle field of painting. Instead they display the "warring icons" of our own visual memories.

Highlight After Word is the theme chosen by Walter Van Oel for this exhibition, evoking a river of light that is beyond oral tradition. This flood of visual memory is halted or damned or stuck because of our tendency to bring textual semantic meaning to the work. For ancient peoples, these memories flowed as after words.

Highlight After Word, after the work of Andy Warhol, is once again a reminder of the totalisation of a narrative system that takes hold of us and buries us within its dark philosophy.

Afrizal Malna

Curator O House Lab

MAO, 190x475cm, mixed media on canvas


CHINESE SMILING BUDHA_1 190 x 300 cm, mixed media on canvas


BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH, 190 x 300 cm, mixed media on canvas



BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH, 190 x 300 cm, mixed media on canvas



HONORING CHINESE CULTURE, 190 x 300 cm, mixed media on canvas


HONORING BALINESS CULTURE, 190x190cm, mixed media on canvas


HONORING BALINESE CULTURE, 190 x 190 cm, mixed media on canvas


HONORING PICASSO, 200 x 100 cm, mixed media on canvas


HONORING PICASSO,100 x 200 cm, mixed media on canvas


SWASTIKA, 190x190cm, mixed media on canvas

Next on O - 19 Juli 2009

The 20th and 21st Classical Contemporary Piano

O house gallery - Sunday, 19 Juli 2009 - 10 AM - 12 PM

18 - 25 Juni 2009

Pertukaran Budaya Indonesia - Jepang

18 - 25 Juni 2009 @ O house gallery

Anarko Body 24 April, 2009 - Women in the Realm of Music 26 April, 2009

ANARKO-BODY
24 April - 17 Mei 2009

Tubuh manusia adalah sebuah keajaiban yang berlangsung terus-menerus sepanjang hari yang kita lalui, berlangsung di luar (tubuh yang kita saksikan) dan di dalam diri kita juga (tubuh yang terberi pada diri kita).

Dalam sejarah senirupa kita, belum pernah terjadi tubuh menjadi medan eksplorasi yang berlangsung luas dan dalam seperti yang terjadi dalam senirupa Indonesia dewasa ini. Tubuh menjadi tempat untuk pulang yang paling dekat dengan diri kita dan sekaligus yang terus menyimpan pesona, kodrat, dan ketakutan-ketakutannya yang laten atas luka, tersakiti, kesehatan maupun politik identitas yang diprovokasi dari luar.

Tubuh juga menjadi tempat pulang yang paling dekat setelah menghadapi berbagai hiruk-pikuk nilai dari dunia luar, walau bisa dipastikan tubuh kitalah yang paling lelah dan menderita menghadapi hiruk-pikuk itu. Ketika kita kembali pulang menemui tubuh kita, mungkin yang kita temui hanyalah kelelahan yang tak bernama. Rasa absurd atau asing dengan diri kita sendiri.

Senirupa kini, yang paling banyak mengungkapkan derita-derita tubuh personal maupun tubuh sosial kita sendiri yang mungkin tidak terlalu kita sadari. Sebab, bukankah kita bisa menipu tubuh kita dengan konsumsi (makanan, pakaian), rekreasi (hiburan, liburan, olah raga atau kesenian) yang bisa kita lakukan setiap saat. Tetapi tubuh tidak memiliki kemampuan untuk menipu diri kita sendiri kalau dia lelah dan menyimpan banyak derita.

Anarko-body, merupakan tema yang dipilih dalam pameran ini dalam konteks dunia perempuan di Indonesia. Tubuh perempuan adalah tubuh yang paling memiliki kejaiban karena dia memiliki mekanisme menstruasi dan reproduksi untuk melahirkan tubuh yang lain yang disebut sebagai anaknya, dan tubuh perempuan itu pun berubah menjadi tubuh ibu. Tubuh perempuan juga tubuh yang paling banyak menghadapi kekerasan politik identitas, merasakan setiap saat kekerasan kosmetikasi kecantikan, serta eksploitasi dalam rumah tangga untuk melayani suami, anak-anak dan tetek-bengek rumah tangga lainnya.

Anarko-body, seperti membawa kembali tubuh kita ke titik nol. Baik tubuh sebagai representasi dari diri kita yang paling dekat untuk menyadari keberadaan kita, sampai dengan tubuh sebagai media yang paling banyak menyimpan memori-memori sosial maupun personal kita. Para perupa perempuan dalam program pameran ini (Carolina Rika Winata, Davina Stephens, Dona Prawita Arissuta dan Lelyana), dengan kapasitas, dedikasi dan karakter seni yang mereka geluti, menyampaikan kembali politik tubuh perempuan dalam bingkai mereka masing-masing. Mutasi tubuh kepada objektifasi benda-benda maupun objek visual lainnya, menjadi mungkin terjadi sebagai bagian dari anarko-body ini. Tubuh yang dikembalikan pada titik nol yang bisa dibaca sebagai tubuh tanpa negara, tanpa kebudayaan, bahkan tanpa dirinya sendiri.

Afrizal Malna (O House Lab Curator)

Caroline Rika Winata, Dona Prawita Arissuta, Lelyana Kurniawati, Davina Stephens

CIGE 2009, Beijing, China, 16 - 19 April, 2009

Made Wianta " Mata Paku "

MADE WIANTA: PERNYATAAN DARI MATA PAKU (STATEMENT IN NAILS)

“Finishing one of my works is an important moment for me. At that moment I feel like a bee that stings and then dies. Then the work is finished. It cannot be changed, improved, or re-worked.” Made Wianta.

1. Politik Visual dari Pematian Tubuh (The Visual Politics of Corporeal Death)

Wianta explores – often perilously - visual strategies that are both expansive and complex. An Indonesian artist who has traveled through many cultures, he transforms all that he touches. With Indonesia such a melting pot of different values, and suborder of these same values, Wianta has become an artist who on the one hand is subservient to these values, yet on the other hand is free to move, like a rat finding its own way, through the world of art. And during his various journeys, Wianta has maintained an awareness of his position amidst the flow of trans local traffic that is such an inescapable mark of globalisation.

For Wianta, art is a medium for comprehending the volatile border between peace and conflict caused by value difference. Wianta considers his visual work as though he were blind. From this extreme position of blindness, he carries out visual work through ‘pematian tubuh’, or corporeal death. This negative logic is the rationalisation of the ability to see and the inability to see - blindness as relative awareness. This transcendent aspect of blindness, or this ‘pematian tubuh’ is the moment at which the body develops its own visual language, quite unexpectedly and surprisingly. Effectively this also becomes a way for the individual to avoid becoming a subject of hegemony in the quantitative trans local traffic scenario previously mentioned.

The consequence of this blindness is an intensification of the qualitative and quantitative processes in the work that he is carrying out. The body is no longer a ‘technical protagonist’, or even an ‘intuitive machine’ that monitors its own movement and intentions. Often Wianta uses small forms (points, lines, barbs, nails, wire or pins) in his work, in a celebration of detail that brings about a transformation in which the quantitative becomes qualitative in his work. Repetitive motifs, of measured depth and frequency, serve to energise and laugh in the face of conflict. Values politicking is not meant to destroy, rather to arrive at the same viewpoint in the understanding of difference.

“Pematian tubuh” is Made Wianta’s conceptually aesthetic means to release himself from the limits and the hegemony of technique. The concept can also be seen as a way forward for those of us who enact values as if in a locked safe. Developments in Wianta’s recent work do not represent the technical skills that his body has become able to perform. He has used media to transform 3 dimensional objects into 2 dimensions, and not without visual risk has opened a space for the politics of meaning emerging from public icons.

2. Prajurit Peradaban dan Makna Waktu (Civilization Warrior and The Meaning of Time)

In the work of artists today, there is a movement towards the idea that “all media have the potential for visual provocation in so far as they are able to popularise that which is enchanting about them”. Publishing and distribution is not generally managed by individual artists, rather by many hands in control of the audio-visual media necessary to communicate, document, and reproduce artists’ work. ‘Spirit’, as meant by Hegel, died along with the introduction of digital media, and as a result the exclusiveness of art has been relinquished to the fashion industry.

The bodily aspect of art, in which all artists display the wonder of their character and manual dexterity, is in a state of shock. This is an age in which artists are ganging together and burying their ‘bodily art’, and subsequently there has arisen a kind of ‘new panic’: the rush to use media and tools to replace the manual body, which was previously so revered, due to its being owned by a human - a ‘high’ creature, capable of perceiving the world and its history in a rational way.

This state of affairs would appear to sound the death knell of the world of art. But today artists are striving to find again the meaning of time through what has been termed ‘contemporary art’. Realism has become the central import of the question: “What is time?” Left wing views that a century ago were most responsible for constructing the concepts behind realism, are now considered bankrupt, and the personal dimension that used to form the basic language of every artist has been left to atrophy. That is why realism is once again under review. Realism is no longer seen as the result of the ‘single eye’ of a single individual’s understanding. Rather it is the many eyes boasted by respective media, materials, and the objects that surround us, that contain within them the threshold between the seen and the unseen, the felt and the unfelt. The meaning of time itself is being re-sought in order to give a name to this new relationship.

‘Sharp’, the theme of an exhibition by Made Wianta at Gaya Gallery (Ubud, Bali) 2008, was a conceptual exhibition, and at the same time a statement in the context of this new realism. The phenomenon of humans surrounded by objects is here no longer a truth relating to the idea of humans as central protagonists who determine their world. Rather, humans are the commodities of the objects that surround them, with consumerism just one phenomenon that supports this idea. Objects do not only have eyes in so far as they borrow and then control the eyes of humans, but they also possess a certain ‘sharpness’ as they are in a sense weapons.

“Prajurit Peradaban” (Civilization Warrior), a work by Made Wianta using nails, appears like thousands of soldiers of unknown allegiance and unknown strategic intent. The nails are at play amidst several layers, and arse strategically raked in visual gradations. There is a play of colour, shadow, and gradations of layer. The result is a show of strength resulting from structural intensity in which detail can be appreciated above a tangible density of form on the face of the piece.

“Prajurit Peradaban” is a statement based on the idea of the ‘mata paku’ (‘nail’ in Indonesian – literally ‘nail eye!’) as an eye that has been poked. It is as though this eye will create a view of the world that displays those of our wounds that never seem to heal, so that we might reflect on this.

3. Realisme dari Ruang Pribadi (Realism in the Private Realm)

Broken glass covers and emanates from a mattress, the kind used for sleeping, and glass also covers its pillows. We do not know exactly whether we sleep here in order to rest or to wound our bodies. Indeed, we do not know where these pieces of glass come from, although they appear to spring from the mattress in this work of Made Wianta entitled Glass Room.

Wianta probably feels it is not necessary to ask where the glass comes from. For Wianta, the completion of a work is like a bee that stings and then dies. Perhaps when we sleep our bodies effuse all of the memories recorded throughout the day, and these memories become like shards of glass emanating from our mattress. Will the glass-covered mattress wound our bodies? Or do the shards of glass indeed emerge from our bodies only to become snagged in the weave of the mattress cover and its pillows? All is a kind of realism born of a personal space that stores time, events and memories. In this personal space we are not sure whether that which is represented is a personal space that has been wounded or a personal space that wounds. This kind of realism does not avoid ambiguity in order to overcome any ideological hegemony; it rather upholds ambiguity so that we remain suspended consciously between rationality and provocation in a game of visual politics.

4. Biografi Hujan dan Matematika Visual (Rain Biography and Visual Mathematics)

On a white canvas, thousands of pins shower down like rain. This rain does not make us wet, or flood our homes. Featured in two of Wianta’s works, the rain is a metaphor comprising new meanings for the visual weave of selected materials based on the same kind of consciousness, namely small items embedded within a large form. The visual effect of this choice of material stems from their measured quantity, which converts into quality. It is as though Wianta exercises visual mathematics in order to carry his work to this new level - not only quantity, but also the distance and depths between one item and another. The transformation of quantity to quality introduces a new voice, like thousands of buzzing insects. Biografi Hujan (Rain Biography) by Made Wianta is like a series of stories being told by thousands of small voices, pure and sharp. Here he is more reflective and poetic if compared to previous works. Biografi Hujan is like a distant and pure voice imbued with longing, and we are taught to long again, to wait patiently, to wait for that moment when the purest voice will whisper to us. At moments like this, it is as though we can feel the presence of that ‘spirit’, but not the spirit meant by Hegel that can only be explained in its own terms. This spirit is the spirit – in small letters – that has perhaps been hiding within our pores and that we have been unable to hear. It is the spirit that strives to remove longing, to restore the will to live and feelings of reciprocity. It is the spirit that does not reside in the battlefield engulfed in a war of conflicting truths.

By Afrizal Malna (O House Lab Curator)

Glass Room - 100 x 200 x 35 cm - Mixed Media - 2008



Civilization Warrior - 240 x 360 cm - Mixed Media - 2008


Rain Biography - 240 x 360 cm - Mixed Media - 2008


Rain Biography - 240 x 360 cm - Mixed Media - 2008