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.