Teguh's love for Paris creates masterpieces of art

By Amir Sidharta

JAKARTA (JP): Bursts of free brush strokes, blotches of paint, controlled lines mixed with word and photographs cut out from magazines in what seems like an explosion of visual elements characterized Teguh Ostenrik's Dans Paris series, being exhibited until Sept. 18 at the Gallery Teguh in South Jakarta.

The exhibition is the result of Teguh's visit to Paris in 1992. He was invited by gallery owner Damien Boquet to spend a summer painting. Intending to call the series "In Paris", he asked Boquet how to say it in French. Boquet answered "a Paris". Teguh then asked how to say "in the bath", and Boquet answered "dans la bains". So Teguh asked if he could call the series "Dans Paris" instead of "A Paris", because he felt as if he had drowned in a bathtub called Paris. Boquet said that it would be grammatically incorrect, but that "Dans Paris" had a rather poetic tone. So Dans Paris it was.

That was the last time Teguh was in Paris, but the actual execution of the paintings was not done in Paris but in Jakarta from memory.

"But my memory is 32 MB, and the processor a Sextium chip," he assured. What does that mean? It can be easily quantified. One byte is roughly a character, and a word is about six characters. Thirty-two MB therefore, is about five million words or, if a picture is indeed worth a thousand words, about five thousand pictures. The sextium chip must be the next chip after the Pentium, so it would undoubtedly be much faster than the Pentium we know today. Quite impressive.

Teguh's intercourse with Paris was not limited to the summer of 1992. When he lived in Germany between the mid-1970s to mid- 1980s, he visited Paris regularly with his German friends who had a love-hate relationship with France.

These Germans, he explained, on one hand did not like the French snobbery, but on the other hand were envious of the way the French were able to enjoy life. The Germans hated the way the French refuse to speak any other language other than their own, but at the same time they preferred to use words derived from the French in their vocabulary.

During his 1992 visit, however, he was alone, which afforded him a new, different and exciting experience. Once spoken words no longer make any sense, visual elements take over. "My eyes became like a vacuum cleaner," Teguh said, likening himself to the moto crottes "city vacuum cleaner" of Paris, collecting a myriad of visual elements from all over the city.

Collage elements

He hoarded any visual substance he could find in Paris. Even the cut-out images pasted in his painting come from the garbage bins of the cosmopolis.

Sculptor Dolorosa Sinaga observed that Teguh's pictorialism comes from a tradition that originated with Picasso and Braque. At the time, the French Impressionists painted landscapes as seen from their windows and used the canvas as windows to a landscape. The two cubists reacted against this trend of Impressionism, and truly used the canvas as their medium of expression. They started to include words into the canvas, painted and even pasted on the painting.

"Teguh seems to rely too much on his inner emotions, and hence a chaos or confusion seems to be apparent in his works. His works seems to lack an artistic statement such as that presented by the cubists," analyzed Dolorosa.

Teguh admits that his 1992 visit to Paris indeed confused him, particularly because of his lack of knowledge of French. However, he claims that some people familiar with Paris were able to recognize Montmartre or Gare L'Est in his works. The artist claims that this is due to his success in capturing situations and atmospheres without presenting shapes or forms, as he had intended to accomplish.

On the inclusion of glimpses of the Eiffel Tower in many of his paintings, Teguh claims that he refrained from going up the tower to maintain his obsession of the symbol he considers the epitome of modernity. According to Dolorosa, the use of the symbol reflects an Impressionist romanticism still prevalent in the artist's approach.

To combine representative pictorialism using symbols such as the Eiffel Tower with non-representational symbols expressive of emotions in a chaotic collage is of course valid. But then we are left to question whether the combined elements have undergone any transformation. Have the intermingled words acquired new meanings? Have the sum of the parts become greater than the whole.

Although a certain charm emerges in his smaller paintings and even one or two larger ones, most of Teguh's paintings lack the strength and coherence of the Dadaist collages and the art work of Robert Rauschenberg. In most of his paintings, we are still more interested in the photographs or the words he includes rather than the whole painting.

Evidently, Teguh is still trapped in the romantic pictorialism of the canvas as a window on the world. However, from his vantage point, the window is no longer limited to the rural fenestration looking out to idyllic landscapes. Rather it is an urban window with a view of the chaotic growth of the city; a printed media window looking into a violent world; and even Windows 95, looking into the chaotic cyberworld of the Internet. Does including these worlds into his window place him dans Paris?

In assessing the exhibition, Parisians would be the best judges of whether Teguh has succeeded in capturing the spirit of Paris. Is Teguh's work Dans Paris or Sans Paris?

If France persists with their nuclear test in the Pacific, we would be better off Sans Paris. And if it is indeed as safe as Chirac claims, why don't they just test it Dans Paris?

Teguh is a talented artist and a creative recyclist. After the Berlin wall was demolished, he planned to use parts of it in his art work. In 1993, he succeeded in amassing a pyramid in Munduk, Bali out of plastic waste. In this exhibition, he recycled words from magazines found in trash cans.

What next Teguh?