Artist Djirna a witness to the mood of his people

Artist Djirna a witness to the mood of his people

By Jean Couteau

DENPASAR, Bali (JP): All artists long for recognition, but few
achieve it. Made Djirna is among the handful of Balinese painters
who has.

The 43-year-old artist is one of the country's most sought-
after painters. At the opening of his recent exhibition at the
Padma Hotel in Bali, half of the collection of paintings
exhibited were immediately sold to a handful of collectors who
specially came from Jakarta and Magelang.

Considering the state of crisis in the country, it is worth
asking to which "needs" do Djirna's paintings respond? Is it
enough to talk of taksu, Balinese for divine inspiration, as
critic Agus Dermawan does, or of greget (irrational attraction),
as does Oei Hong Djien, one of Indonesia's most serious
collectors, and one of the organizers of the exhibition.

To this writer, Djirna's key to success lies in an uncanny mix
of technical sophistication and thematic simplicity: the skills
of the painter are put at the service of a simple vision of the
world in which everyone, and each collector in particular, can
recognize some of his dreams -- and nightmares.

Technically, Djirna pays much attention to background elements
such as texture and color. The texture, often coated with a thin
paste of wood or marble dust, has a gritty feel that broadens the
enjoyment beyond the field of the purely visual into that of the
tactile. But the pleasure is also aesthetic with regard to color.

Beyond the usual terra-cotta of his previous series, Djirna is
now exploring various types of green and white. Even though
the result may be somewhat too dark, the artist knows how to play
with soft nuances so as to convey a general impression of warmth.
To this color skill is added a broad variety of brush strokes:
successively thin, massive, with well delineated contours or the
opposite without contours; the forms then melting into one
another to create an atmosphere of eerie unreality.

These various skills are combined in thematic series, whose
message varies with the color mood or the features of the
characters represented. Sometimes it gives the whole scene a
ghostly, fearsome look. In other works it generates an atmosphere
of angst. But most often it conjures up an idea of harmony and
love.

Djirna likes to say that his figures are all distorted, but it
would be wrong to conclude that this deformation is systematic.
It closely relates to the themes of the artist's works. In his
"sweet" series, like those themes such as women and pastoral
scenes, the figures may be rounder than nature and presented in a
synthetic, anonymous way, but they retain a well-proportioned
look that bears witness both to the artist's knowledge of
academic realism and to his past as a Balinese village painter.

In the other series, however, the distortion is more
accentuated, and, seen from a stylistic point of view, closer to
Karel Apel and Dubuffet's works than to Balinese peasant
iconography. At its maximum it exposes a world of subconscious
archetypes, which express Djirna's deepest private fears or
the ghostly monsters of the island's culture.

Djirna's favorite theme is that of women. But Djirna's woman
is altogether different from that of non-Balinese (Hofker,
Dullah, Le Mayeur, etc.), who depict her as an exotic and sexual
object, always shown bare-breasted or carrying offerings to a
temple. To Djirna, on the contrary, the woman is a symbolic
archetype: the woman as mother. Her shape, round, conjures up the
theme of the egg and, ipso-facto, of fertility, found also in the
way she wraps her child in an oval composition.

This primacy of the mother is confirmed by the secondary
position attributed to man. Even though his shape may be combined
with that of his woman to make up an egg-shaped unit of the
family, more often than not he impersonates the little people or
is frankly featured as a negative influence. He then appears as a
shadow threatening a group of women or goading them into
immoral actions; is involved in drinking and debauchery (see
illustration). No man ever assumes the position of the father
figure.

Djirna's positive image of the woman, however, changes as soon
as she gives up her function as mother. In a crowd, she stops
being unique: she becomes a plurality of women exposed to sin and
defilement, and/or threatened by modernity. From the state of
balance symbolized in motherhood and fertility thus follows a
state of disorder and evil, of which women are both victims
and carriers. Their representation automatically changes. Their
figures become thin and outlandish, when not frankly monstrous.
Minions and ghostly animals appear at their back. Finally the
witch shows up: The lord of black magic, the dark bloodsucker, is
a woman. The witch replaces the mother.

This duality between them mother and the witch may be viewed
as one of the manifestations of the Balinese concept that holds
that all aspects of reality consist of complementary opposites.
With Djirna, however, this worldview is wrapped in a personal
language. To him man lives in a world dominated by visible and
invisible forces, positive and negative ones, which are in
constant flux and intermingling. On top is the mother, both real
and mythological. Its symmetrical opposite is the witch, the
woman as temptress and master of the negative forces. Ordinary
women oscillate between the two roles: they are constantly
subjected to temptations. As for man, he is either a threat or
the woman's benign partner.

We can now understand where lies the appeal of Djirna's
painting: honest, rooted in his own culture, yet artistically
open to the modern world, the artist skillfully formulates
Indonesian people's' longing for a balanced world -- that of the
fast disappearing "Beautiful Indies" of their agrarian youth --
and their fear of chaos, that which is presently unfurling
throughout Indonesia.

He is a witness to the mood of his people. If he
may be sometimes too sweet, his latest works demonstrate that he
is not reluctant to go against his collectors' mood and come up
with exceptionally strong moments of expression.

All in all combining technical skill, love for form,
multilevel richness of content and, most of all, sensitivity,
Djirna is a reminder to the young generation that, beyond the
faze of fashion, painting is still mainly love for one's work,
simplicity of expression and, above all, sincerity in one's
emotions.