Great painter Miro meets Nashar at a Bali gallery

By Chandra Johan

SANUR, Bali (JP): Joan Miro, the great world-renowned painter, meets Nashar, Indonesia's maestro painter. Not the people, but the art.

Around 30 of Joan Miro's (l893-l983) works and 20 of Nashar's (l928-l994) are on display at Darga Gallery in Sanur, Bali, in a joint exhibition from Sept. 2 to Sept. 23. This is a rare event, indeed. The Miro pieces presented in the gallery are his drawings on paper, the master's genuine works that we can see directly.

Why is the gallery bringing together the works of Miro and Nashar, an idealist artist?

"The combination of the two masters' works is a realization of Darga Gallery's efforts to pass the cultural, historical and the worn-out West-East dichotomy differences," said Jais Dargawidjaja, owner of Darga Gallery.

The aesthetic exploration and achievements of both Miro and Nashar are expected to inspire young artists, she added.

According to Jais, this Miro-Nashar exhibition is the continuation of her efforts to bridge the divide between Indonesia and France in the field of arts and culture. This is not easy, but with the approach of an art dealer, she is trying hard to enter into the European market, which, after being mesmerized by post-colonial exoticism for such a long time, is now opening itself to the complex nature of global art.

"So this exhibition also carries a long-term mission," she said.

Since its opening in 1997, Darga Gallery has many times organized the same projects, even though they do not bring them big profits.

Its first exhibition, Modern Masters of Indonesia and Europe, was a comparison between historical French (European) modernism and Indonesian modernism. In the event, works of world masters like Picasso, Matisse and Chagall were combined with Srihadi Sudarsono, Jeihan, Sadali, and others.

In 1998 Darga Gallery presented Ida Bagus Made's works and a joint exhibition of the contemporary works of several young Indonesian artists.

"Galleries and art dealers can only live in a community where there is a high appreciation for art. Therefore, a gallery has a great responsibility to increase its community's art appreciation. Events like this are not to generate money, because in fact, this project makes a loss," Jais said.

Joan Miro was a Spanish painter. He entered art school at the age of 14. In the years around the beginning of the 20th century, the capital of Katalonia was the creative center for Spanish art. Prominent artists like Picasso, Gaudi, Dali and Miro himself grew up here.

Like other painters of the same area, Miro was early on influenced by modern French art movements like Fauvism and Cubism. After World War I he moved to Paris, where he was soon accepted into the avant-garde circles. At that time Dadaism, with its absurdity, questioned the position of art in society, while Surrealism renewed the theme by digging below the conscience element.

In the beginning Surrealism was an organized intellectual movement, which developed under the leadership of French poet Andre Breton. In the Surrealism movement Joan Miro had an important position besides the main schools which developed under the influence of two other prominent painters: Andre Mason and Salvador Dali. Mason was interested in the process of self- realization and creating automatic abstract paintings, a technique that would inspire American abstract painters 30 years later. Conversely, Salvador Dali, who was interested in the process of unconsciousness, in particular, dreams, gave his paintings very realistic form. Miro was between those two surrealistic sub-schools and at the same time passed Surrealism itself. His works were trips of color and free form which are not limited by any principle, except by the principle of freedom itself.

Judging from the stylistic classification, Miro's development experienced several stages. The first works show a tendency of magic realism, by using flat colors and simplicity of shapes. The nature looked alive, its elements changed shape and function, carrying us to a magic world. At the next stage he changed into an abstraction of pure color, which bore an empty image, strange in a combination of colored icons. Then in the last stage he again created surreal elements with flat color.

The works exhibited at Darga Gallery bear witness to several processes of Miro's work little known by most people. All are works are on paper.

Nashar is a legendary Indonesian painter who, until his death, firmly held his artistic stance, although with that he had to sacrifice everything. His standpoint and artistic attitude filled his diary, popularly known as Surat-Surat Malam (Night Letters).

In that diary we could find his controversial three non- concepts: Non-Preconception, Non-Technique and Non-Aestheticism. The controversial reception of his three non-concepts did not influence his art. In fact, on Nashar's canvasses we don't find ornaments. They are dry, austere and simple. It is that simplicity which makes Nashar different from the mainstream of Indonesian modern painters, who had the tendency of technical exploration, who saw visual elements as a means of achieving aesthetic value.

That is not the case with Nashar's paintings. Nashar in fact refuses ornaments and avoids patience. He would not try to entertain and have fun through something emotional. The strength of Nashar's painting is not in the brush strokes -- he always painted roughly -- but on impulse and metaphor. In a number of his paintings, Nashar is economical in his brushwork, often employing a staccato rhythm of lines.

It is the simplicity and flatness that bring Nashar and Miro together. They shared the same interest in a "flat colored space", which made the two painters' works appear musical and poetic, although they had different interests in their subjects.