Kartini transforms still life into life-giving energy

Carla Bianpoen, Contributor, Jakarta

Kartini Basuki's retrospective exhibition of around 70 works at the Regent Hotel, Central Jakarta, reminds of the long tradition of still life painting, and its place as a vehicle for artistic expression.

Derived from the Dutch word Stilleven to describe a new genre at the beginning of the 17th century, still life is a tradition associated with the northern European schools. Consisting of fruit, flowers or daily household objects, still life used to appear in a supporting role to human action as exemplified in some of the Italian painter Caravaggio's works.

In time, however, still life reached its own zenith and became a vehicle for the avant-garde in the work of the Impressionists and van Gogh. Although somewhat lost in the current notions of contemporary art, it has remained a legitimate vehicle of artistic expression, as revealed in Kartini's retrospective of marvelously finished paintings, spanning a period of roughly 17 years.

Following her own quiet path with consistent serenity and peace, Kartini has intriguingly persisted in filling her canvases with still life representations of Indonesia's abundant variety of flowers in renditions alternating from the serious, the meditative to the cold and introvert, and on to the whimsical, the playful, and the jubilant.

One is struck by her painterly skills, her outstanding sense of color values, a balanced interaction of form, hues and surface, and a keen sense of perfection, features that are also evident in her non-flower still life paintings.

Particularly striking are her still life representations which blend the impressionistic with the notion of the beyond-real, or the sur-real in settings with magnified shapes of the subject matter positioned on an edgeless surface that is colored in hues echoing the colors of the surrounding sea and the sky, like in Hibiscus 1997.

Provoking sentiments of bliss with a touch of the mysterious is the painting Faith, Hope and Love 1999. Positioned on a bare wooden table top is a lime fruit in the same yellow hue of the table, and a large half-filled glass in blue rising up to the sky, colored in another hue of blue. The brown rock stones bordering the left and the right of the tabletop accentuate the colors, while a bird souring into the sky could be evoking a certain direction of the beholder's flow of thought.

As Kartini silently goes her way in the tangle of the art world, she may have arrived at a crucial point. Whether this is due to her current involvement in meditation and meditative healing, or just a logical evolution in an artist's path to excellence, new dynamics are at play.

While she continues emanating peace and a certain level of tranquility, an undeniable evidence of change is evident in her most recent works, particularly notable in the splitting of the painting into parts, which gives the unusual notion of motion and new energy. It also denotes the prelude to what might be the beginning of an abstract mode. While the united parts still form a realistic whole, albeit with a surrealistic touch, each of the parts could stand on its own and render the illusion of an abstract painting.

Another new feature in Kartini's works is the mask, which may be inspired by the masks used in the Javanese dance dramas, but may also have been provoked by a growing atmosphere of social manipulation.

Painter Teguh Ostenrik in his colossal work on the Homo Sapiens Sapiens, has extensively elaborated on the several masks that each and everyone is wearing in relevance to time and occasion. Also the artist Astari Rasjid in her earlier works denoted the wearing of masks to conceal her real sentiments.

Kartini singles out the woman in her work Masks over Masks.

Is the artist entering the discourse on gender, or is this only a playful gesture? Whatever it may be, the various characters of the wayang (puppet) represented by a pletoria of masks painted on a mask featuring a sophisticated woman's face cautions against existing gender biases.

Taught for a brief while by the artist Sudjojono who is also called the Father of Indonesian Modern Art, Kartini is essentially an autodidact, whose talents and skills were acknowledged by the Biennale Internationale d'Auvergne in 1989, only a few years after she took to painting.

Kartini Basuki's retrospective exhibition runs until Jan. 2, 2002.