Surrealist painter has slanted view on industrialism
M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The surrealist movement in painting was born out of the premise that the bourgeois society was so decadent that it did not deserve art. Hence, the movement decided to give it anti-art -- ugliness instead of beauty.
The lack of form was, therefore, a way to rebel against the deteriorating society.
Aside from refusing to become eye candy for the complacent audience, for Bandung, West Java-based artist Rieswandi, resorting to surrealism also serves as a powerful means to revile the degrading quality of modern life.
In his works, currently on display at the Artnivora art gallery in Kemang, South Jakarta, Rieswandi points to the fact that although their lives have been inundated with a steady flow of consumer goods and have engaged in a relentless pursuit of products, people have grown out of touch with the objects.
Through meticulously drawn paintings of objects such as factories, apples, houses, cups, an ark, chairs, ladders and clothes, Rieswandi has breathed new life into the objects by twisting and bending them.
All the deformed objects, somehow, appear to beam with a strange and idyllic substance, quickly grabbing the visitors' attention, even for those who have eyes untrained for surrealistic paintings.
Greeting visitors upon entering the Artnivora entrance is the lonely Homey II, a painting of an object that could be perceived as a factory-cum-house.
Against a pink backdrop, Rieswandi has drawn an object that resembles a factory-house, complete with smoke-spewing chimney.
However, against the regular portrayal of a factory that is usually teeming with activities, Rieswandi's factory looks solitary and the only indicator of life within the building is the brown smoke that blows from the chimney.
How many of us ever have the time to think about a place where a large number of the country's laborers spend a great deal of their lives, let alone view it as an object with an artistic merit?
In Bad Apple, the 27-year-old artist takes his uncanny critique on industrialism even further.
Using an apple as a potent symbol of man's lost innocence, Rieswandi laments the onslaught of modern industry against the pristine lives of ordinary men by cutting open the fruit and inserting an object that aptly represents industrialism -- the factory-house.
However, the apple is portrayed as dwarfing the factory, evoking the belief that somehow human nature will prevail in the midst of the onslaught: an ambiguous love-hate relationship with human progress.
The strongest evocation of the painter's surrealist imagery is present in Dream Project, a collection of 20 paintings that deal mostly with independent objects that seemingly sneak out of his wildest dream.
Following Dali, who lectured that images from the subconscious should reach the conscience, Rieswandi freezes the object on canvass to give the consciousness the opportunity to comprehend them.
Giant, odd-shaped fruit, trees of cloud, a house inside a jacket and a ladder reaching up to the sky are among the objects in Dream Project that are immediately distilled from the painter's dream.
"The next thing to do after waking up from a long dream is to unravel the long journey -- when a chair no longer plays its role as a chair or when a table no longer functions as a table. Something that is disturbing, odd and without boundaries will always be present," Rieswandi said.
Pink, artworks by Rieswandi runs until July 30 at Artnivora art gallery, Jl. Kemang Utara 50, tel. 7199614. Tuesday to Sunday 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.