Dutch artist displays 'Indonesia Memories'

Dutch artist displays 'Indonesia Memories'

By Parvathi Nayar Narayan

JAKARTA (JP): Indonesia Memories at the Erasmus Huis is based
on just that -- the memories of Paul Husner and his wife, and the
trips they took in Indonesia.

In 1983 and 1985 they visited Sumatra and Bali. Fascinated by
the musicians in Bali and by Batak statues, he made several small
sketches, recording his impressions of both subjects. Later in
1987, in his studio Amsterdam, these two strains of images fused
together to form a series of five oil paintings entitled Muziek
Ritueel I. This is one of the series in the exhibition, which
was opened on Feb. 7 by Toeti Herati, the rector of the Jakarta
Arts Institute.

Husner, though born in Switzerland, has spent most of his
adult life in the Netherlands in pursuit of the arts. Among other
things, he learned painting at the National Academy of Art in
Amsterdam from 1967 to1970. Ten years later he was to teach
painting and drawing there. He has had several shows in the
Netherlands and his work is in state collections and in
collections of the City Council of Amsterdam.

In 1995, during a hot summer spell, Husner felt the urge to
return to his Indonesian sketches. He made a fresh set of
drawings and compositions highlighting the daily life of the
people. He drew fishermen, young girls with baskets of fruit,
young men on bicycles, offerings to ancestors, beaches and boats.

Husner cooked spicy Indonesian food and contemplated the
sketches, unsure of what colors to use. Then one day it came to
him that he must use a slightly different palette and use
stronger brighter colors with a lot of predominant blues.

He did one more series, Muziek Ritueel III. Working on colored
paper, using line and tone, he scumbled pastels over the surface
allowing the color of the paper to show through. The paper sets
the predominant hue, such as red or blue, and thus the tone for
the painting.

The exhibition itself is the brainchild of Husner's wife, Tine
G. Ruiter, an anthropologist at the University of Amsterdam. She
wanted her husband's Indonesian paintings to be exhibited in the
country of their inspiration. Furthermore, she saw a connection
between these Indonesian paintings and three other series done in
1995, the Passage, Airport - Entrance Hall and Mediterranee. She
calls it Muziek, Klank, Kleur or the sound of color in Husner's
paintings.

Husner's work is based in reality, and this relationship is
very important to him. In Holland, Husner is known as a colorist.
His normal palette is soft, and typically before beginning a
painting he experiments with the palette he wants to use. He
takes the light, middle and dark tones of a color, tries out warm
and cool color schemes, and various combinations of colors before
settling on his palette. He is intellectually concerned with the
nuances of colors and their juxtapositions. The various elements
in the Indonesian paintings are usually strongly outlined but
perhaps too rigidly delineated.

Toeti Herati said of the watercolors that it was not the
"mask-like faces and solid objects" in them that were the essence
of Husner's art, but the backgrounds.

"Blood and soul are seeping out of the contours to become
palpable through the real and apparent texture of the background
which is screamingly more alive than the stillness of the
figures," she said.

The colors used in the Indonesian series are heavy, almost too
harsh, especially in some of the oils featuring musicians.
Indeed, the figures do not seem to articulate with the ease or
lucidity which his passages of pure color do, in the non-
Indonesian series.

Compositionally, therefore, the latter are much more
appealing. The most fluid examples of his skills as a colorist in
this exhibition are found in the Passage series. Passage II has a
single dark figure within a large space that is flooded with
light. By a clever use of bands of neutrals, grays and beiges
over an underpainting of blue, the light is framed and
concentrated in the middle of the picture. This center is painted
in airy hues, pale blues, greens, lemons. Passage I deals with
the same idea in warm tones. Or take Mediterranee 4 which is a
lovely play of blues, aqua marine and cerulean. Or the criss-crossing
of red-gold shadows in the Airport -- Entrance Hall paintings. The
colors in these series are clean and easy on the eye.

What does Husner himself wish to explore in his art?

Husner says that he is looking for sensitivity in color, for
poetry in reality, and for "... color in combination with the
rhythm of form. I'm searching for a unity between color and
form."

Indonesia Memories will remain at the Erasmus Huis on Jl. H.R.
Rasuna Said, Kav.S-3, Kuningan, South Jakarta until March 8.
Admission is free.