Bonny Setiawan paints a changing Yogyakarta

By Amir Sidharta

JAKARTA (JP): Painting scenes of daily life in the rapidly changing city of Yogyakarta, Bonny Setiawan emphasized certain elements which he considers culturally significant or of personal concern.

One of his strongest paintings depicts a wayang kulit performance. It is set in a strong composition which includes the stage, the backstage and the audience in one simple spatial arrangement. In the upper part of the painting sits the dalang (puppet master), the central figure. Above him appears the "stage" of the wayang performance, with wayang figures arranged in rows. The dalang himself is moving the two central characters of the episode.

Below the dalang is what is known as the "back-stage" in western theater. This part of the painting is filled with the musicians, the sinden (singer) and the gamelan ensemble. Further below, around the periphery of the mat where the musicians sit, the audience can be seen watching the show as vendors mill about.

Many other wayang scenes appear in the exhibition, but the most interesting one is a painting of a cardboard wayang vendor, which shows a puppeteer showing a figure of Gatotkaca to three boys who watch. Behind them, next to a screen filled with a row of puppets, a man in black watches the children, looking concerned.

Often Bonny shows scenes of daily life in Yogyakarta which are starting to change and disappear. In one painting an exhausted becak driver, cigarette in hand, awaits his next customer. In the background, high rises appear signaling the rapidly developing city of Yogyakarta. A crescent moon looms over the high rises. Another painting shows bakul (street vendors) riding two delman, horse-drawn carts, with buildings in the background.

A painting called Going to the Ketoprak (traditional Javanese play) shows four figures lining up in front of a ticket counter. Above the counter, the sign "Siswo Budoyo" indicates the venue of the performance. Here, again, the attendant's head appears framed within the counter's windows. It is clear that the painter does not intend to present a realistic image of the subject matter.

In Bakul Jamu (Herbs Vendor), Bonny shows a jamu vendor serving a customer. The main figures are large in the center of painting, while others support the central theme. A few figures are shown eating at a warung on the upper left corner of the scene. The words Gudeg Djogja (a traditional dish of Yogyakarta) are stenciled on the warung's muslin screen. A woman attending the warung watches the scene outside her premises through a square opening.

The depiction is handled in a way that seems typical of the school of Yogyakarta, which includes M. Faisal, Yuni Wulandari and Erica Hestu Wahyuni. Although these artists may not consider themselves as one group, the art they produce is clearly similar in style, using simplified figures and bold primary colors. Some observers group these artist as "naif" painters. Bonny's work may be classified in the same group as the other painters. However, he also has a number of features which distinguish his work from the three others. For example, when creating forms of figures, Bonny often adopts the approach of the cubists. He segments a figure into angular geometric planes so the figure appears as if viewed from several different angles, not just by one fixed point of view. Bonny's use of stenciled letters is also reminiscent of the cubist paintings of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso.

When depicting negative spaces, he utilizes a style skin to Ries Mulders cubism. Mulder, who taught art at Bandung's Institute of Technology in the 1950s, was known to divide negative spaces into fields of color.

A couple in wedding attire appear in Yogyakarta Lovers. They are placed in a setting reminiscent of Yogyakarta's Taman Sari water palace. The rendering of the architectural blocks in a nocturnal scene presents a dream-like quality akin to the works of Giorgio de Chirico, albeit only superficially.

Bonny was born twenty-eight years ago in Wonogiri, Central Java, into a family of artists. His father worked in the theater and also painted, while his mother was a member of the Sanggar Bambu painting studio. After completing high school, Bonny entered the Indonesian Fine Arts Academy in Yogyakarta in 1987.

His style clearly reflects the influence of his Academy training. Bonny paints Javanese subject matter using a technique influenced by western art. While he has developed an artistic style which is distinctly his own, it is still recognizable as related to a collective regional style of the Yogyakarta artists.

However, Bonny does not only present traditional elements or scenes. One interesting painting is a party at a discotheque in Yogyakarta. Here the figures he renders are deformed, almost amorphic, as they move on a spacious dance floor. Among them, Javanese super-hero Gatotkaca meets his American counterpart, Batman. Above the dance floor, on the trusses of the space's structural support, a big band ensemble appears, channeling music to the hall below it, in a composition reminiscent of Tisna Sandjaya's etchings.

From this odd painting, it seems that Bonny is as interested in cultural change as he is in the Javanese traditions he normally displays. Therefore, not only his technique but also his artistic style and subject matter seems to be open to change.

Bonny's paintings are on display at the Duta Fine Art Gallery in Jakarta until Nov. 12, 1996.