Naivete liberates the paintings of Erica Hestu Wahyuni

By R. Fadjri

YOGYAKARTA (JP): Children's sketches and drawings, whether put down in disorderly strokes or in sweeps of merry colors, have an honesty of infinite dimensions in the leaps of fantasy they make on canvass or paper. Personality and intellectual development at an early age liberates children from expressing themselves in sophisticated ways. Simple strokes to build simple forms and the use of basic colors denote a plain line of thinking. On the other hand, a child's dream world may emerge in the fantasies arising from colors and forms.

Children's drawings are a response to their surroundings. The child's empirical and psychological world should hone his or her instincts to play around in the world he or she knows, or even in totally strange environments. It is how they learn to know their environment, or learn to communicate within their environment. This phenomenon in children does not differ from those of artistic adults. The only difference is that adults put the experimental and psychological world in a more complex frame. The result? Creative expressions arising from complex minds.

Erica Hestu Wahyuni is no exception. She deploys a childlike technique as a deliberate choice of expression. Her solo exhibition to be held at Purna Budaya building, Yogyakarta, from Sept. 21 to Sept. 27, has added to the number of painters to this naive genre. A few names include Eddie Hara, Herry Dono and Faizal. The expressions of childlike images on canvasses of these painters were inspired by simplicity, merriment, the dream world and the playful spirit of children.

However, the childlikeness in the works of adults is a fabrication, the result of complex engineering of various elements.

However, it looks as if Erica has decided to follow her own path. The mother of one, she has no intention of letting adulthood or her education at the Arts Department of the Indonesian Art Institute in Yogyakarta, engineer her childlike image into a complex creation.

Erica's works appear more as paintings of children in an optimum processing stage of development than that of the works of an adult exploring childlike images. The source of Erica's ideas are closely connected with her family and environment. Her romantic relationship with her own self, her child and her husband, is repeated in her association with a TV set, a jar, a cupboard or a painting.

Inanimate things come to life in her paintings, diffusing a warmth or arousing a wave of emotion. Here the things are no longer merely objects. They have become objects with strong, private and emotional connections for Erica.

We are reminded of how children treat their kin or everyday objects. We have heard a child talk to his or her bear or toy car, as if these objects have a soul of their own. The items are transformed into close friends.

Erica's family is her world, which is an infinite source for her works. Erica has experienced numerous incidents in her daily life as a housewife, all happening within the restrictions of her garden fence in Yogyakarta. Her work Watching Television (1992) was inspired when the family sat together in front of the TV. Her painting Home Sweet Home I (1993), is of her husband watching TV while her child kept her company. Home Sweet Home II (1993), depicts her busy in the kitchen and watching the TV at the same time while her child whined for something.

Fly To The Gold Space (1993) shows a flying man carrying a child and a woman on his back. There is also a painting showing a couple and a small child on TV as another female of more generous proportions appears to scrutinize fragments spread over the canvass through squinting eyes. This narrative of happiness and pleasant family life might be a fragment of Erica's own experience, or a psychological part of reality.

All her paintings are done with simple lines in prime colors, possibly obtained from a felt tipped marker or crayons. We do not meet shade mixtures in Erica's paintings.

The naive style in modern art was started by the late Soedjojono, an authority on modern painting in Indonesia who endeavored to preserve the Indonesian character in the art of Indonesian painting.

Soedjojono's advice to young painters at the time was to paint as someone who had never painted before, or to draw as a child whose expressions are still uncluttered and pure. The purity typical of children could be the medium by which genuine purity in the Indonesian painting art may be reached.

Nearly all the special traits found in children's drawings are present in Erica's paintings. For instance, painted objects are made transparent, showing the inside of the house and all its contents. Her paintings may also take the space concept, for instance, where the nearest item is placed at the bottom part of the painting, and objects further away are found in the upper regions of the work. Aside from this, plain forms in Erica's paintings resemble the efforts of a child, rather than a deformed model made by adult hands.

This is the difference between Erica's works and those of other artists who follow the naive style as a form of expression. It was not at all surprising that Erica's works were chosen as a therapy for mentally handicapped children at the Bergen Institute in Schoorl, the Netherlands.

Erica's approach is like a strong emotional display refusing to let go of the romantic period of her childhood. It tells of life lived in honesty, a simple life colored with beautiful dreams. It is life which should rightly be owned by toddlers, though people have the right to mind them and possess them to the best of their ability.

Erica's childhood may have been a simple one, as simple as a child's expression. In adulthood, however, it is this childhood that casts a richness over all her paintings.