Angga creates new genre in graphic art

Sri Wahyuni, The Jakarta Post, Yogyakarta

Narpati Awangga is proving that contemporary graphic art is enjoyable for practically anyone. People don't have to scrunch their eyebrows to understand the works he displays at the French Cultural Center.

On entering the exhibition room, visitors will be greeted by some 3 meter by 12 meter bright colorful murals and acrylic paintings. They are set in such a way that they look like a single artwork that flows smoothly along the wall from one end to the other.

Titled Dipaksa Oomleo (Coerced by Oomleo), the exhibition actually features only three acrylic-on-canvas paintings. However, the way they are set on the wall and intermixed with the murals (paintings on the gallery's wall) is what has made this particular exhibition different and worth visiting.

"I made the murals correspond with the three acrylic paintings in order to make them more interactive for the audience," Narpati Awangga, or Angga as he is usually called, told The Jakarta Post after opening the exhibition last week.

To do so, for example, Angga put on the wall next to a painting a huge title, much bigger than the painting itself. The title has been written in different colors brighter than the painting itself.

In Power So Good, for example, a painting dominated by pink hues featuring Rupuz, a funny orange comical cartoon character of Angga's own creation, is put against the wall while a spot of yellow paint spills onto the floor right under the canvas. It gives the impression that the yellow spot has just flowed out of Rupuz's body.

On another part of the wall, next to a painting "Something dropped to the ground", is also written in large lettering.

"I had a dirty thought as I made it. I imagined a man's semen drop to the floor during intercourse. But I make it look decent by making it very decorative," said Angga.

"With this work I mean to show that something suggestive can be presented artistically without the viewers feeling offended," he said.

The mural, too, according to Angga, was made to accumulate all things that happen at the exhibition into a single and special format of a graphic arts game named "swinging ball".

"This (the game) is what is supposed to make everything here communicate with the visitors," said Angga

To play the game, players are required to swing, not throw, a ball hung with a tiny rope in front of a mural featuring different characters of Rupuz as the targets. There are four different targets offering different musical sounds as rewards.

Born in Jakarta on May 8, 1978, Angga who is currently completing his study at the Graphic Arts Department of the Indonesian Institute of the Arts (ISI) Yogyakarta, is renowned among his fellow artists as a graphic arts game specialist.

The ongoing exhibition is his fifth solo.

"I plan to publish a book containing a collection of graphic arts games that I have created since 1996 when I first started the work; two years from now at the latest," said Angga.

Angga, who claims to have been strongly inspired by American graphic artist Keith Haring for his comical characters and Italian graphic artist M. Escher for his works' interactivity, likes to create simple things.

"I don't like talking about complicated things. That's why my works are all simple," he said.

Angga wants everything he creates to be interactive and to appeal to both adults and children.

--The exhibition at Yogyakarta French Cultural Center (CCF), Jl. Sagan No. 3 (tel. 0274-566520) will run until Aug. 31, 2002.