Dede Eri Supria: Creating dynamic strokes of alienation
Carla Bianpoen, Contributor, Jakarta
Most people associate painter Dede Eri Supria with a consuming urban labyrinth, which he has visualized in dramatic images of barren high-rise construction. But the painting he has made for the ongoing CP Open Biennale 2003 testifies to his base of realism steeped in expressive dynamics.
Me, My Hand, My Imagination (250 x 750cm) is an oil on canvas work showing three panels in which the same figure is set in identical positions. One is struck by the dynamic and heightening of simultaneous sensations rising through the creases, adding up in the respective images of the red colored T-shirt and emphasized by a barbed-wire entanglement in the third panel.
In the repetition of form, the artist suggests an incessant action of energy lying deep under the surface of helplessness.
A similar technique of repetitive form actually started back in 1980 with the work Yang menekan dan yang ditekan (The Oppressor and The Oppressed, 185x 100cm) which entitled him to the "best painting" distinction at the 4th Biennale held by the Jakarta Arts Council in 1981.
But nothing could beat his spectacular 11-panel painting Yang menari dan terpuruk diantara canvas dan palet (Dancing and Falling between Canvas and Palette, 1992), in which drummers were set in identical positions, just like the brush and the palette in the upper part of the panel were set in identical positions. But in between, the changing images were telling the story, now retold in Me, My Hand, My Imagination.
"This is a self portrait," Dede said, pointing at his increasing sense of alienation as an artist. Immersed in his daily activity of painting, Dede says the feeling of being outside real life is intensifying by the day. Lonely and alone in his studio, it's like being shut in and shut off from the world, he confided. The work also suggests his anxiety at the risk of being continuously exposed to the negative effects of paint.
His urban labyrinths deal with the same issue: human alienation in a country striving for industrialization. A particular focus has been the city where the natural environment is increasingly forsaken for towering, impersonal constructions. Images of mazes fill his large canvases, emanating a sense of theatrical decor.
The artist's intense feelings about the urban scene may stem from his own personal experiences. Born in 1956 as the seventh of 11 children, he has reaped significant sucess in his life and art, his works now part of museum collections around the world. At his roots, however, he comes from an environment never far from dirt, waste and the roar of construction activities as it underwent inexorable change in the name of progress.
Sometimes consisting of cardboard boxes, and at other times made of a dramatized version of a factory-like interior, the works often have faceless or face-covered images. But his haunting preoccupation with the urban sites is best revealed in the large canvases, where huge building structures with one solitary tiny figure denote the utter desolation of being swallowed up in the urban sprawl.