Made Wianta is the soul of Balinese abstraction

Made Wianta is the soul of Balinese abstraction

By Jean Couteau

JAKARTA (JP): "Art is a win-win activity." Such were the words
of Minister of Education and Culture Wardiman Djojonegoro on Oct.
3 when he opened Made Wianta's exhibition at Santi Gallery in
Jakarta. Not only does art benefit from economic activity, he
said, it also generates it. At the same time, it enhances
aesthetic appreciation, and thus it also boosts cultural
awareness among the general population.

Wianta, 47, is one of those who have benefited from the art
boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Indonesia's new
urban elites, awash with money, took over the old role of the
kings and state as patrons of the arts. A new class of collectors
came into being. Painting became a matter of personal taste
rather than a mirror of cultural belonging. To them, the
narrative content of a piece of art -- that of Javanese or
Balinese symbols, or of European-inspired exoticism -- was
secondary to the aesthetic of the form. In other words, they were
increasingly opening up to abstract, "modern" art, the pure
language of colors, lines and volumes.

Wianta rode and is still riding this trend of openness. After
the late Nashar, and together with Sunaryo, he is one of the few
Indonesian artists who have succeeded in creating a genuine
Indonesian abstraction of "indigenous" components. He was
recently nominated by a group of critics as one of Indonesia's 10
best painters, and topped the list of the abstract ones.

The exhibition at Santi Gallery, to be held until Oct. 14,
takes us through the evolutionary process of Wianta's work. It
invites us to see how, from a Balinese background, with its heavy
symbolism and iconographic patterning, an artist can "abstract" a
formal message which is readable by modern eyes and yet eerily
Balinese and Indonesian.

Wianta was born in 1949 in the village of Apuan in the remote
highlands of the regency of Tabanan. He knows the sounds, the
touch and the colors of a living nature. As the son of a temple
priest, he was also raised in a visual world of offerings, barong
and procession, and saw the gods come alive in the regalia of
magic and color. In his teens he even became a dancer performing
in temple festivals. Wianta, in other words, was shaped by the
same traditional world that shaped the village painters of Bali.

At first, nothing looks more un-Balinese than Wianta's art.
Balinese painting as we know it is a narrative type of art
related to religion; its system of form is tightly patterned, and
the painters are villagers who express in their works the
collective values of their societies.

Wianta is the opposite of this definition. He proposes an art
that is strongly individualistic in spirit. His works never refer
to any recognizable symbolism. They focus simply on form and
color. Kalender Segi Tiga (Triangular Calendar) or Dimensi Segi
Tiga (Dimension of a Triangle), for example, are complex
constructions of geometric figures and regularly graded color
dots, giving the impression of the artist as a man in perfect
control of all aspects of his work; Permainan Bidang (Surface
Play) and Permainan Segi Tiga (Triangle Play), on the opposite,
are paintings where the artist displays a free and "destructive"
play of brush and color -- an attempt at looking beyond. But none
of these works -- nor any of his paintings -- express an
outwardly Balinese cultural message.

But Wianta's painting, throughout all the range of its forms
and colors and its apparent heterogeneity, is not a mere
inventory of the potentialities of abstraction. It is rather an
inventory of the layers of the artist's self, the self of a free
man. Instead of borrowing outward elements of the pictorial
language of his culture of origin -- that of narratives, stories
about gods and demons and the beauty of nature -- he recreates
this language by unveiling one aspect of his subconscious after
the other.

Wianta's geometric, or otherwise regular and patterned
paintings, are paradoxically those where his Balinese
subconscious comes to the fore most forcefully. The idea of space
and form remains undoubtedly Balinese. The canvas is "full" and
"occupied" by small iconic and subiconic units that are patterned
in a near-repetitive way that remind us of the figurative
patterns of traditional Balinese painting.

In these works Wianta also pays close attention to details and
to the decorative. No less Balinese is his use of color, not only
in its hues, golden and reddish, but also in the way the colors
are well-delineated within a graphic outline or in lines of dots.
Last but not least, the multicomplex combination of icons,
patterns, dots and colors calls to mind the cosmic themes of
Balinese tradition.

Besides order, the most Balinese side of Wianta's psyche, his
works also reveal disorder, through which his creative urge is
expressed. Such disorder is a recurring phenomenon. Full space
becomes empty space, patterns are broken, lines become irregular
and colors kitsch. See, for example, Dimensi Ruang (Space) or
Permainan Segi Tiga. Then Wianta is basically on his own and
beyond Bali. He senses color for the sake of color, discovers
space for the sake of space and dismantles forms for the sake of
form.

Indeed, it is perhaps when he combines both aspects of his
work, the orderly and the disorderly, that Wianta is at his best.
In Constellation, a huge 2x4meter painting, he blends the
regularity of the dots with the spontaneity of the brush, in a
feast of golden colors which take us into the stellar world of
the artist's psyche. His masterpiece, undoubtedly.

What is Wianta's key to success? His dance-like creative urge.
A Balinese dancer himself, Wianta brings the art of dance to the
field of painting. Full of lightness and spontaneity, his works
are ultimately patterned in choreography. They show spontaneous
splashes of color and automatic drawing on the one side, and
archetypal forms on the other. A constant dialog between
spontaneity and order, repetition and creation, Bali and the
world around it.

With Wianta, abstract art is well alive in Indonesia. It faces
a win-win future.