Alberola creates silk screen magic
Mehru Jaffer, Contributor, Jakarta
The work of French painter Jean-Michel Alberola has raised a thousand and one questions in the minds of art lovers here.
"I did not imagine that silk screen prints could be so effective as fine art," confesses Azizah Asnawi, public relations officer at Jakarta's French Cultural Center (CCF).
The CCF is hosting an understated but extremely intriguing array of silk screen printing works by Alberola, 49, also known around the world as a bit of a prankster, philosopher and painter.
Serigraphy is not unknown in Indonesia as the process has been popular here for commercial printing for ages. Some artists have also used it as a new art form. But in the hands of Alberola the ancient art takes on an extraordinary color.
Alberola specializes in picking up very ordinary themes and elevating them to an almost extraordinary relevance. In the Cain and Abel series he has blown up photos of five famous faces that appeared on French paper money such as Pascal, Debussy and Descartes as a reminder, it seems, to review what had made those people great in the first place.
Alberola likes to point out everything that is taken for granted by less observant people and to infuse it with a brand new meaning. He does not want great minds like Godard and Nietzsche to remain just names in the lives of people but tries in almost poetic ways to keep alive the thinkers' unique view of the world.
To Alberola, Christ is not just a Christian figure but a universal symbol of the suffering of all human beings in this world. Alberola often signs his work with Acteon, the name of the hunter from Greek mythology who dared to watch the goddess Diana bathing.
As punishment he is transformed into a deer and eventually gobbled up by his own hounds. The eternal question that seems to plague Alberola is whether he wants to know too much. In the absence of an answer he continues to take every possible risk to know more.
Of course he can not but also help wonder what kind of punishment will befall him for his insatiable desire to explore areas that are forbidden.
All the joyous and frightening emotions of finding himself often where he is not supposed to be is what goes into Alberola's art.
The idea of stencil printing exists from Paleolithic times. Stencils were used in ancient Egypt and Greece for mosaics. The Romans used them for advertising on wooden boards. The Fiji islanders converted banana leaves into stencils and during the six dynasties of China stencils produced mass images of the Buddha.
The process was refined by various cultures and experiments in using silk cloth as a screen were first performed in Germany and France in the 1870s. When a multi-color method was developed in San Francisco in 1914, the process became popular for commercial printing and also tried out as a new art form.
It was Carl Zigrosser, curator of prints at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the late 1930s who first used the term serigraph as an original print created by the artist from the artist's own design.
It was modern artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg who used serigraph, from the Greek word sericos or silk and graphos or writing, for creating great compositions that continue to amaze both viewers and aspiring artists to this day.
"What endears me most to Alberola is his habit of trying to create exciting links between the past and present," says Natalie Guignabaudet, Director CCF.
The exhibition runs until Feb. 28, 2002, at Selamba Raya 25. Further information at 3908585.