Italian 'Deep Blue' blends art and sea

Mehru Jaffer, Contributor, Jakarta

It is not rainfall or river floodwater that is deluging the National Museum building these days. Deep Blue is an exhibition of 13 contemporary painters from Italy who are united in their love of the sea. Together they believe that it is in a drop of water that the whole universe is found and they favor the current that leads to the attainment of the real essence of life.

To help create an ambience that is befitting to the watery artwork is a group of young Indonesian architects who have imagined the interior of the exhibition as one large belly of the sea. Along with partners Luwi Bonar Arifin and Gheorghe Nae, 28 year-old Nungky Laksmindra Budisantosa has covered all the lights at the new wing of the National Museum in transparent blue and the entrance is curtained off with strips of blue plastic.

As business in architecture is slow, Nungky is working increasingly with interior design and installation work. She told The Jakarta Post they were not familiar with the work of the Italian artists until just three days before the exhibition opened. The challenge was to prepare the premises for the exhibition from their own imagination and the accent was on remaining minimalist so the exhibits did not drown in the trappings of the surroundings.

Mutable-Immutable is a video installation by Silvia Stucky. Images of waves constantly arriving and departing greet visitors along with sounds from the shore compiled by Luca Spagnoletti.

The theme of flowing water is typical of all of Silvia's work from paintings on paper to videos that reflect the artist's desire for direct rapport with nature. The entrance to the exhibition is paved in sand and visitors have to step on stones to enter Atlantide, a sand installation by Ines Fontenla in memory of the legendary city of Atlantis.

The Argentinean artist based in Rome imagines the mysterious Atlantis after having read the description of the vanished city by Greek philosopher Plato. According to Plato, the lost city sank to the depths of the sea centuries ago and remains a mystery to this day. It is not even sure whether the city ever existed?

Getting its name from Atlas the Titan, Atlantis cradled a civilization believed to be more advanced than our own. It was a peaceful city thriving on commerce and high technology.

There are different theories about the exact location of the city with some placing it in the Indian Ocean, Antarctica, south of Japan and the small island of Santorini. It was Plato who first dug up the legend of Atlantis. And it is Plato's account of the continent swallowed up by the sea that continues to excite the modern mind. Plato's Atlantis is a kind of paradise, a vast land larger than Libya and Asia put together with magnificent mountain ranges, lush plains and luxuriant gardens.

But at some stage Atlantean society began to decay and false gods of wealth, idleness and luxury were worshiped. The gods prepared a terrible retribution for all those who betrayed the ancient faith of Atlantis, inflicting violent earthquakes and floods in just a single day and night of misfortune, causing the island of Atlantis to disappear into the depths of the sea.

The Atlantis of Ines is interpreted as a lost space of ideas. In the artist's imagination Atlantis is a place of many truths and the presence of many thoughts. She seems to say, what a pity it does not exist anymore!

The exhibition exposes a mountain of creativity that the contemporary mind is capable of collecting. Thanks to Martine Merola Gevaert, Italian Ambassador and an ardent admirer of contemporary art, both European and Indonesian, viewers in Jakarta have had more than one opportunity to view art from Europe almost simultaneously as it is composed and exhibited in that continent.

Piero Luciani's Retrievals is amazing proof of the heights that art is able to scale. Out of the six exhibits that the 48 year-old artist has on display one is just a map of the coast where he lives and works. The other five are mixed media canvasses of different colors composed by him with objects he has collected from around his home. The map helps to identify the place from where he has retrieved each object and used it in his art. Piero's work is also a geological record of where granite stone is found and where only pebbles are strewn on this particular coast.

Pino Modica has six photographs framed in portholes for a series titled Motorship Island of Pearls Navigation Company of Sardinia. His work is inspired by mundane actions of human beings and he has photographed a cabin crew soon after docking. Most beautiful is Rosanna Cattaneo's exhibit titled The White Wave- after the wave... before the wave, which is a photograph upon a painting. The first panel is a photograph of an incoming wave. But slide the panel apart and there is a painting beneath of the same site with the same wave, but in recession. This display has a long lasting visual and emotional effect on the viewer.

Explaining the relationship of art to the sea, Patrizia Ferri says in the preface of the exhibition's program that a sea is like an immense metaphor of a common visual language where roots of differences sink. Art and the sea are profoundly bound like the East and the West on the wave of a common auspicious wheel in a future that in the present is already flowing under our very eyes. These artists are fully conscious of building bridges between different visions of the world.

Deep Blue, the Art and the Sea, National Museum, Jl. Medan Merdeka Barat No. 12, Central Jakarta (Tel. 3868172), until June 17.