Diyanto: The body, the real and the absurd

Diyanto: The body, the real and the absurd

By Astri Wright

PASSAU, Germany (JP): Modern Indonesian art is making inroads
in new places. The Cafe Museum exhibition, in the Museum of
Modern Art in the small southern German town of Passau, includes
works by Indonesian painter Diyanto, who is also one of 14
artists taking part in the exhibition Not I. Am I? currently
being held at the Nadi Gallery in Jakarta.

Few things are more stimulating than the encounter of
unexpected juxtapositions and unlikely but happy embraces. This
was one such instance. Walking into the Cafe Museum exhibition in
Passau and meeting the visions, shapes and colors of this
Indonesian artist was a thrill.

It was the thrill of encountering yet another view of a
shifting paradigm -- a fresh view of the beached whale of western
modernism with its penchant for thinking of modern art as a
purely western product.

It was also the thrill of encountering an individual artist's
offering to the world of a slice of his soul, viewed through a
kaleidoscope of unconscious and conscious imprints and reactions,
aesthetic choices and marks.

Diyanto, who was born in West Java in 1962, has a standard
background for anyone desiring a career as an artist over the
last few decades in Indonesia. After first studying at the
Bandung Teacher's College, Diyanto studied at the Bandung
Institute of Technology (ITB)'s School of Art and Design,
graduating in 1990. Since 1995, after several years as an
assistant lecturer at the School of Art and Design, ITB, Diyanto
has been a lecturer at the Academy of Art in Bandung.

The artist's clear, contrasting and layered colors,
representative and abstracted forms speak of his acute concern
with the human figure. He is fascinated with how the body is
impacted upon by firsthand experience. And while he is interested
in many kinds of experiences, he is particularly drawn to
experiences around pained and strained personal and social
relations.

Diyanto is not a fantasy painter or a seeker of ideal beauty.
But his vision of the "real" is not propagandist or overtly
political. The moment-to-moment selections of human drama he
chooses to paint, while sometimes presented within formalist
framing devices, as if seen through prisms or linear grids, are
also often inscribed with sentences or words that sway the
interpretation of the work in specific directions. At the same
time as a work conjures up the fear of sudden social intimidation
or political violence, the painted motifs appear to have been
steeped in a marinade of the absurd.

Diyanto's works attest to a sensibility with both breadth and
a particular slant, and in this way they choreograph or direct
the viewers' responses in specific directions. The absurdity of
living in horror, of being victim to creeping suspicions, the
constant questioning of perception -- is it intuitively accurate?
Is it absurd? Paranoid or paranormal?

Two older works exhibited in Passau, Victim 1 and Victim 2
(1987) contrast greatly with the rest of the exhibited works, all
painted in the last half of the 1990s. In the earlier paintings,
the color scheme ranges over tones of screaming red, orange and
dark maroon. The later works show, on the whole, a darker palette
with more subtle color contrasts.

Also, the narrative structure of the early and later paintings
differ greatly. The Victim paintings show the moments after a
violent event and are single-focused statements, both in image
and title. The word "victim" speaks of injustice, the colors and
forms scream of blood, the shape of the grieving, bent figures
scream out about the grief that weaves ties between the dead and
the living.

At the same time, the way the limbs and muscles are painted,
we see the artist's interest in anatomy and his indebtedness to
European master paintings and sketches. The nude reclining
figures, powerful as they are at first glance, soon reveal
themselves to be too heavily weighted in the direction of
traditional academic figure studies, and in the 1990s, as he
is finding his own footing as an artist, Diyanto departs from
this style.

Among Diyanto's later paintings, Growing up between an iron
and a chair (1995) is among the more absurd and humorous. It has
the rare quality among this artist's work of hinting at
autobiography. While this reference may appear as a departure
point of some solidity, the rest of the work is uncannily hard to
read. If one focuses on the chair and the iron as providing the
bottom line of the painting, the main human figures appear upside
down; if one chooses the figures to show the canvas's right side
up, then the chair and iron (a heavy instrument that could be
deadly if dropped) are upside down.

Not only is gravity canceled out in this painting, as opposed
to the very realistic falling and spreading of limbs in the
Victim paintings, but the human figure has become ghost-like,
haunting unreal spaces filled with both shadow and color. The
only order is provided by black and dark vertical lines that
sometimes block and sometimes back up the figures -- one of
Diyanto's grid-like devices that in some works conjure up the
thought or memory, if not the actual presence, of jail bars.

In his working concept statement, Diyanto sets the tone for a
reading of his works as both conceptual and specifically grounded
in pragmatic reality. "I still believe in initial ideas. But
inevitably, I am also involved in external experiences."

Diyanto is not a narrowly focussed artist, not obsessed with a
single formalist or conceptual issue, a method by which some
Indonesian artists have staked their claim to fame.

The author is an associate professor at the University of
Victoria in Canada and a long-standing researcher of modern and
contemporary Indonesian art.