Teguh's love for Paris creates masterpieces of art

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?