Czech artist Jiri Chmelar wants to grasp infinity
By Mehru Jaffer
JAKARTA (JP): Czech-born artist Jiri Chmelar has finally made it to Jakarta. He has come to Bali three times in the past, but does not consider those trips as a visit to this country.
"That place is not Indonesia. It is not part of this world. Bali is a piece of paradise that is out of this world," the artist told The Jakarta Post minutes after he arrived here all the way from the south of France.
With him, Chmelar brings an exhibition of more than 30 pieces of his latest work where he uses the medium of photography to create images that are so stunningly surreal that they hurt. But they also provide much pleasure, which is, as we all know just another name for pain.
Although Chmelar insists he is not alone in doing this kind of work, his work has a certain originality about it that is not often seen at least not in this part of the world. The use of primary colors on glossy photographic paper mixed with closeup shots of faces from around the world superimposed with other multiple images, serve as a great big splash of cold water rude enough to wake up any sleepy imagination.
When Chmelar says it is the process of deconstruction that excites him most, all he means is that he refuses to take anything in life at face value. Desperately clinging to the way his mind worked as a child when he would spend hours putting together something and then dismantling it all, Chmelar continues to collect what you and I would call garbage and recycle it into a piece of art.
The central European artist was introduced to Southeast Asia in 1997 when Chmelar exhibited for the first time in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Hanoi using the title Playing the Game as opposed to Playing Games.
Actually his affair with East Asia started in 1977 when he was posted at the Czechoslovakian embassy in Hanoi as cultural and press attache for two years. On returning home, he could not get himself to work for a totalitarian government anymore and he escaped, leaving his wife of three years and his place of birth to start life all over again. His most treasured possession at that time, he recalls, was his dreams.
He went to Germany without knowing a word of German and was forced to use his art to communicate but found it very difficult to make a living as an artist.
Between making the rounds of art galleries where most rejected his work, Chmelar did odd jobs to earn money. A gallery in France finally acknowledged Chmelar's talent and the rest, as they say, is history.
Today the artist has lost count of the number of exhibitions he has participated in since those difficult days.
Chmelar started his career in art by assembling boxes made of wood, with a glass front and filled with colorful objects, shapes and forms. He traces the inspiration to his childhood when his father found time to be with the family and brought out the portable puppet theater. As he opened the box full of a thousand and one items to entertain, the children waited without either blinking or breathing. It is in imitation of his father's magic box that had made him so happy as a child that Chmelar has been assembling and reassembling boxes for the past two decades.
The box fascinates Chmelar because it imprisons and protects. It represents the world Chmelar was born into, a world devoid of civil liberties but also provided him with inspiration preserved from the past on how to resist oppression.
His greatest fear in this very fast pace of life is the loss of primary pleasures from the psyche. His circumstances forced him to sever the most precious of human relations with his young wife, and his country when he decided to go into self exile in 1980 and realized the pain of having done so only much later. Although he has no regrets about the decision he made two decades ago, he does feel that nothing in this world is more important than the relationship between one human and another.
"It does not matter where you live these days in a world that has become so small but what is far more important is all those you love," says Chmelar, regretting that in our hurry we leave little time to cultivate relationships with human beings. So these days he spends much of his time doing just that.
From objects Chmelar is graduating to the human form whose various moods he tries to understand. And no other face fascinates him more at the moment than that of a Balinese. His visits to the island are preserved in several roles of film.
"They are still in a drawer and I wait for the right moment to expose them," smiles the very soft-spoken Chmelar who describes a typical Balinese face as one so full of joy that it makes him never want to stop looking at it. He claims that throughout his stay in Bali he did not see one sad face. Although he imagines that many of them must have similar problems and anxieties as others in the world.
In the Jakarta exhibition, visitors will notice there are less boxes and more faces on display. But Chmelar does not like to be labeled a photographer. He calls himself an artist who uses photographic techniques like multi exposure and "sandwiches" to make sense of what lies beyond. After all it is infinity itself that the untiring artist wants to grasp more than anything else in the world.
The exhibition opens on Feb. 8. and runs until Feb. 17 at the Czech Embassy Cultural Room in Jl. Gereja Theresia 20, Central Jakarta. The viewing hours are from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.