Dewa Ngakan Ardana turns garlic into art
Dewa Ngakan Ardana turns garlic into art
Carla Bianpoen, Contributor/Jakarta
As garlic is transformed into stirring art that refreshes the soul in the exhibition hall of CP Artspace Jakarta, one might wonder whether the artist of the garlic on canvas is aware of the healing powers of this humble ingredient of fine food.
The history of garlic goes back to antiquity and while it is an important ingredient for fine food, there is also a widespread belief that garlic is a preservative against evil influences and attacks. In writings from early civilizations, we know that garlic was also a prominent medicine.
The wisdom of the ancients was confirmed in modern times when the microbiologist Louis Pasteur put a few cloves of garlic into a dish full of bacteria. A few days later, he found a clear zone of killed bacteria around each clove. Both before and after that discovery, garlic preparations have been used to disinfect wounds and to treat illnesses from cholera to cancer.
It is safe to say that Dewa Ngakan Made Ardana, the artist behind the exhibition at CP Artspace, probably knows nothing of all that.
For him, garlic has been part of his life since he was a little boy, a matter of survival so to say.
It was garlic that his mother brought to the market to earn a living, and garlic it was that took Dewa to the market to help his mother. And so, this humble but important ingredient became the object for his artistic urges, revealing the garlic's process through its various stages of life, and on the way transforming from photo-realistic image to forms where feeling and sensitivity evoke an inexplicable stir in the viewer.
As humble as the white onion, Dewa is also as honest as his object. No, no, he says, dismissing the suggestion that the garlic has become a metaphor to express the inner waves of his soul. "I just take the onion from various perspectives," he says, but admits to a dramatic touch in the blowing up of sizes.
In the exhibition hall of CP Artspace, Dewa's works of the garlic vary in size from 680cm x 300cm all the way to 80cm x 60 cm.
On the canvases that he has colored in off-white, light yellow, light orange and light green, Dewa lets the garlic -- colored in diluted burnt sienna -- float single or in pairs. The vast planes sometimes consist of three panels, of which two panels are left empty, leaving the third panel to the garlic, which seems to float in an empty space.
The gentle compassion with which the artist carefully places the garlic in the large panel, the meticulous precision with which he lets the peel fall off the garlic, the sensuous turn in the garlic's tail, and the delicacy in revealing the beginning of its decay, all this reveals the artist's intense relationship with the onion.
This is also evident in the stirring installation of the suspended three-dimensional garlic made of fiber that seems to have burst into two parts. Placed high up at the end of the hall, it is like a metamorphosis of the garlic into a butterfly moving through the air.
It seems that the 24-year-old Dewa Ngakan Made Ardana, who blends his life as an onion seller with that of his academic training at the Indonesia Fine Arts Institute in Denpasar, has taken vast steps since his debut at the CP Biennale in 2003 when his garlic onions were a welcome alternative.
Now, while he continues to engage in the garlic, his works are grander, the images even more stirring than before with spaces that accentuate the dramatic in the works.
Dewa's art at the CP Artspace signals the beginning of a great artist. Let's hope he won't be spoiled by success. Keeping within the boundaries of his true self will be crucial for continuing the authenticity of his art.
Spaces in-between, May 5 until May 26, at the CP Artspace, Jl. Suryopranoto 67A, Central Jakarta, Contact: tel. 3448126, ext. 604