Balinese autodidactic artist's Dali-style exhibition

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.