On the inside looking in for Agus Suwage
By Aendra H. Medita
JAKARTA (JP): A self-portrait is a powerful medium to explore who we are and take aim at the world around us, the force which has shaped us and our lives.
This power is not lost on Agus Suwage; he breathes life into his self-portraits while simultaneously showing the metamorphosis of the world's great artists by paying homage to their themes.
His work shows that when a self-portrait becomes a force of sorts to explore, the force will manifest itself in plurality. The plurality becomes a vital force the moment the artist's portrait is worked out in such a way that its role becomes an essential part of the work itself.
Take a stage actor, for example. He must use his body so that an inner power will emanate from it. A dancer will also exercise his instrument, his body, for aesthetic purposes. Does the same signifying phenomenon convey more when an artist visualizes a self-portrait?
Self-portraits in art are particularly interesting because power plays a role as the core substance of a human life. A self- portrait also develops its own discourse, from a more transparent realm of metaphors to the more hidden area of symbolism.
It is this quality that appears as the force in Agus' work, exhibited under the title I and I and I, at Nadi Gallery, Jl. Kedoya Raya, West Jakarta.
The 41-year-old artist -- a 1986 graduate of the Bandung Institute of Technology's School of Fine Arts and Design -- has had an extraordinary journey in art, exhibiting his works in many cities in Indonesia since 1984, as well as in Australia, the Netherlands, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore, among other lands. He has been artist in residence at QUT Brisbane, Australia, and in 1999-2000 at Sai-no-Kuni Saitama of the Saitama Museum of Modern Art, Japan.
His seventh exhibition is a gallery of sometimes shocking self-portraits. Viewing them, we seem to be hypnotically transported into a grand discourse on a subjective human life -- in this respect the life of the artist himself -- so that the strong gaze in Suwage's self-portraits not only provide strong meaning, but also are a blow to viewers when they realize they are taking enjoyment in the image.
That is why it is appropriate to describe the representation of Suwage's paintings as part of his life, which he has tried to deconstruct through the discourse of his self-portraits and then put into the larger framework of his paintings. Suwage's realist paintings are not just imitations or transfers of reality, there is coquettishness, humor, sarcasm, satire as well as condemnation of the situation around us.
Art critic Jim Supangkat has said that as a contemporary artist, Suwage now stands on a grand platform. "He has become a relevant individual, and his works are remote from narcissism because he does not look handsome in his self-portraits. A narcissistic painting will feature a very beautiful figure."
A total of 26 works of different sizes created between 2000 and 2001 tickle and tease visitors. Take, for example, Pandora and Mind Game, two works with uniqueness in which Suwage offers a real anecdote in the language of mimicry. In Pandora, there is a satire of his self-portrait in which his own nose is being squeezed. In Mind Game, he raises the present phenomenon of the grand context of the modern culture of play stations.
How To Explain a Painting to ....., So the 90s Generation Was Born, Panning, Sphinx and Wow Big Splash" paint realities whose objects are borrowed from the works of the world's great artists, thus bringing prominence to Suwage's work.
So the 90s Generation Was Born is Suwage's metamorphosis of So Came the 66 Generation by S. Soedjojono. Suwage borrows exactly the same picture to describe that the 1990s generation is the "'abracadabra' generation -- the booming Indonesia" despite the economic crisis which swept the country. S. Soedjojono's work was created out of a different spirit; he emphasized the political aspect of the situation in which Ampera (the message of the people's plight) was held aloft.
In How to Explain a Painting to ....", Suwage introduces the metamorphosis of a work by German artist, Joseph Beuys, while Panning is taken from Richter's work, Sphinx from Francis Bacon and Wow Big Splash from David Hockney.
Suwage's works, which show independence and strength as self- portraits without the embellishment of grand metamorphoses -- works which reflect his life as an artist -- are Over Smiling, Idealism, Molimo, nDobos, Holy Politician, Conversation of Eyes and Thousands of Bodies.
Suwage's works are not simply his subjective expression. They are closer to the humanistic approach to what is found in the larger context of the power of reality. It must, therefore, be underlined in this greater context that originality does not exist alone in today's artworks.
Originality works by virtue of its own power so that the ideas borrowed from great works may be metamorphosed into a new originality with a new significance as well. Suwage has found himself within this discourse because in his self-portraits, he has not just recorded his routine life but, rather, he has lent greater prominence to new possibilities that may arise from these realities.
I and I and I is showing at Nadi Gallery (tel. 5818129) until Feb. 18. The gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Monday to Friday, and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.