Balinese autodidactic artist's Dali-style exhibition

By Putu Wirata

UBUD, Bali (JP): Gde Sudarma, a 27-year-old Balinese autodidactic artist, has been creating surrealist artwork without realizing the significance of the style and discovered only recently that his paintings resemble those of Salvador Dali.

"A friend showed me pictures of Salvador Dali's paintings. Only then did I get acquainted with the style called surrealism," he said.

About 20 of his works are on display at the Chedi Gallery in Ubud, Bali, until May 17.

Sudarma, born in Sudaji village, Buleleng, is a graduate of a local economics secondary school. He worked for some time in a restaurant at Lovina, Singaraja, before moving to Ubud in 1992, where he worked as a painter in the pengosekan style, a style of close-up painting of fauna and flora.

However, Sudarma felt he was limited in the routine work of painting fauna and flora. After two years, he started painting themes from his wildly running imagination, free from the yoke of the pengosekan style.

"Every time I see images, I put them down in sketch form in order not to forget them," Sudarma said.

However, even from the many images which enter his head, he makes selections.

"I paint ideas which I feel are good and agreeable to work on," he said.

Perhaps we do not need to find a basis for Sigmund Freud's analytical psychology theory to explain the way Sudarma lets his imagination work, realizing the results in his paintings. Surrealism, which is a thing of the past in Europe, is only an intellectual label to mark an expression.

Sudarma himself understands the surrealist style as follows, "In my opinion, the things I can paint in the surrealist style are glasses, human faces, trees, the sea, whatever. Of course, I select the images that are, to me, the most attractive for my paintings."

This means that Sudarma starts with material objects in day-to-day life in his environment, to which he responds in a Salavador Dali style. Apparently the wildness of Sudarma's imagination obtained real colors after he trained with Duco van Weerle, an arts writer from the Netherlands. It is really of no importance whether the basis of the surrealistic theory originates in Sigmund Freud's psychology or not. What Sudarma expresses on canvas, according to van Weerle, still contains Balinese nuances implicitly.

If the following can be considered a kind of theoretical basis, surrealist objects are indeed part of the consciousness of Balinese children. Children are indoctrinated about mysterious beings in big trees, on the edge of ravines, in fountains or cemeteries. Balinese children are "trained" to imagine those beings, made "used to" imagining those beings hiding in trees, rivers, cemeteries, or sacred statues moved by mysterious forces, etc. Maybe Sudarma had such a childhood and his ability to let his imagination run wild has continued to grow.

His painting Waterfall (45 cms by 55 cms, oil on canvas), shows the ability of his imagination to manipulate natural views into something that "lives" in our mind. It depicts a sky with white clouds and a river underneath or perhaps a blue sea with two tree branches and one leaf. The water flowing from the river transforms itself into two white human bodies. The "body" seems to have the two branches as its arms surging into the air. The "body" falls into the blue pool below. In front of the pool there is a tunnel or perhaps a cave connected with a white horizon. It is as if there are two layers of nature on one canvas, something that lets viewers of Sudarma's work enter a mysterious room.

There seem always to be two layers of nature in Sudarma's works, something that gives rise to feelings of strangeness, amazement, terror or perhaps a dream world. Van Weerle tries to analogize Sudarma's works with the Balinese philosophical basis of sekala (real) and niskala (invisible) nature. In Waterfall, Sudarma plays with a combination of two layers of consciousness on one canvas, making both a visual sight in plain view.

Home Coming (120 cm by 140 cms, oil on canvas, 1998) shows two layers of nature in a way as to "terrorize" the viewer's emotions. A neatly dressed young man is lying in a field of grass using a bag and his hands as a pillow. In front of him there is a blue sky, a yellow landscape with a red edge, herons flying and a tunnel to enter another world: the blue sky is overcast by astonishing clouds. It is really never real in a man's experience of nature, it is a different nature that is part of dreams, imaginations, illusions or hallucinations.

If Sudarma thinks that all his works can have a surrealist theme, then it is understandable that he tries to present the shadows of leather puppet in his work The Shadow and the Puppet (44.2 cms by 53.9 cms, oil on canvas, 1997). Here, Sudarma paints two leather puppets from different perspectives. One is from the puppeteer's perspective, the other is from the spectator's. The two leather puppets hold a dialog in the room of the kelir (screen) of the puppeteer.

However, the "real" room is confronted with the "invisible" room by the division of the screen into two so that another room appears, a room in imagination, which may confuse our understanding of perspectives.

There is one painting, Land of Erotica (1999), that gives an impression of the Dali painting Christ of St. John of the Cross (1951). This Dali painting shows a man on a cross but the cross is flying in a dark room. A painting that gives a feeling of tenseness and fear. Sudarma's Land of Erotica depicts a macho figure in a position resembling that of Christ of St. John of the Cross.

It is a male figure flying in the sky with the perspective taken from its head. The eroticism is expressed by a pair of lovers. A female figure is lying below as if it was the shadow of the macho figure in the sky. There is a horse at some distance to the left and a big motorcycle to the right. Perhaps Sudarma's subconsciousness urges him to use a horse, a big motorcycle and a big body as symbols of virility. On the other hand, the slender and smooth body represents feminine softness. Whether Land of Erotica is his original idea or was inspired by Salvador Dali, only Gde Sudarma knows.