The artistic escapades of painter Cristiano

The artistic escapades of painter Cristiano

Carla Bianpoen, Contributor, Jakarta

Renato Cristiano: A Journey through Painting

Bruce W. Carpenter

Published by Mon Decor Gallery, Jakarta

Designed and produced by Archipelago Press

An imprint of Editions Didier Millet, Singapore

150 pp (77 plates)

Earlier this month saw the launching of one of the most
comprehensive and well-written books examining an artist who
lived for more than a decade on the island of Bali.

Renato Cristiano, now 81 and residing in Rome, is hardly
mentioned in the literature on expatriate artists in Bali. Yet he
was among the most important expatriate artists working in Bali
in the years after World War II and the struggle for Indonesian
independence.

He has had major exhibitions in Italy, France, Germany, the
Netherlands and Indonesia, and his works can be found in museums
of note, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and
the presidential palaces of Jakarta, Bogor and Tampaksiring in
Indonesia.

Cristiano's residence in Indonesia began with a four-year stay
in 1955, then alternated between long and short-term sojourns
until today, as he still spends at least a month each year in the
island of his artistic fulfillment.

In addition to Cristiano's time in Indonesia, this book, which
comes in a manageable format and in a reader friendly layout
replete with beautiful plates, follows him from his formative
years in Foligno, an important early center of the Umbrian
Renaissance. It thus facilitates an understanding of his nascent
fascination with Renaissance masters that was to have an enduring
impact on his works.

Containing a detailed description of Cristiano's intellectual
evolution against changes in the political world order, it gives
due space to every phase on this path, which the artist expressed
on the canvases of his sizable oeuvre.

The first 58 pages tell of his endeavors toward excellence,
highlighting intellectual, spiritual and metaphysical
explorations, and the fusion between Eastern and Western cultures
that is the basis of various works.

Born in 1923 in Rome, he spent his youth in Foligno,
surrounded by the idyllic Umbrian countryside. He enrolled in the
Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia, but soon dropped out,
dissatisfied with the conventional training of the school. From
then on he followed his own path of exploration, absorbing and
studying movements that were bringing new ways of seeing, such as
the precursors of avant-garde art like the Futurists, the CoBra,
and Abstract Expressionism at the time.

Philosophical and metaphysical foundations of art and life,
and the relationship between the two, took his attention, leading
to intensive study of modern scientific theory. It included
anthropology, geology, astronomy and archaeology, as well as
Western and Eastern philosophy, with comparative religion and
mythology, mysticism and metaphysics.

Not surprisingly, art for Cristiano switched from purely a
matter of esthetics to connecting ideas and forms to deeper
undercurrents which ran through the human psyche.

The massive oil canvas The Dream marked his engagement with
this proliferation of ideas, signifying his next step into
abstract art. He was only 21 years old, living in a small, narrow
house where accommodating this huge canvas of 200 x 260 cm was a
real challenge.

Particular ideas or concepts were worked out in cycles or
series of paintings, starting with his seminal Rain, and followed
by Testament, a seminal milestone in his development that bridged
his naturalistic, figurative past and the abstract style of the
time.

Testament II included religious and mythological themes, and
Testament III entailed a stylistic blurring of the distinctions
between the dense layering of backgrounds and the figurative,
extending from 1984 to the present day.

Reason and Instinct (Sun and Moon), a work in the Traces
cycle, was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) from
Cristiano's second solo exhibition at the Schneider Gallery in
Rome in 1959.

In the painting, a radiating image of the sun and crescent
moon were created from Cristiano's hands and feet, which he had
pressed into pigments of various colors and impressed directly
onto the canvasses. Cristiano has described the work as a symbol
of the polarities in the universe, identifying the sun with the
masculine and the moon with the feminine.

Other cycles included Consummation, in which he explored the
metaphoric destruction of painting, and Light of Colors in which
he sought to recreate light through systematic use of
complementary colors, followed by Archipittura.

The Four Seasons of 1962 included four large compositions
representing the chronological stages in the cycle of human life,
appearing as biblical epics modeled on the Balinese "rose of the
winds".

A colossal work Prometheus '72 was symbolic of the powers of
creativity which were becoming scarce in a modern age lacking in
imagination and daring.

Among his largest works, Christian Era: Prophecy and History,
painted in 1994 and used on the book jacket, shows Cristiano's
spirituality expressed through syncretic symbols.

Cristiano's Balinese oeuvre has three loosely defined
categories of work: the realistic works, which sought to capture
the essence of Bali and its people; a group of works tracing
their inspiration to Renaissance drawings and paintings; and the
series of paintings with backgrounds containing gold and silver,
reminiscent of Byzantine icon paintings.

The second part of the book, Eternal Idyll, is divided into
themes distinguished in "Faces", "Work", "Play", "Myth",
"Religion" and "Allegory", each introduced by elaborating text.

When Cristiano arrived in Bali in 1955, he was an accomplished
painter, an autodidact with wide experience after dropping out of
the Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia and living around the world.

Of a solitary nature, he did not mingle much with fellow
expatriate artists or local artists in Bali, although he did have
frequent encounters with his first Indonesian collector, then
president Sukarno. He chose to maintain his solitude in his
studio in Putung, high on the edge of a cliff.

Manggis Beach, where he lived with his Balinese wife, was also
fairly isolated, but local fishermen with their sinewy bodies
became a favorite subject in his works.

Here he rediscovered his fascination with the Renaissance.
Balinese people, like elongated figures set in vistas of layered
coloring, evoke a dreamlike world, one that could be anywhere on
the globe were it not for the unmistakable temples in the
background.

The distinct fusion of East and West, with elongated figures
standing out of the blur that veils the landscape taking the
appearance of a Balinese painting when seen from a distance mark
his latest works.

A closer look reveals the artist's sense of duality, of two
worlds in which neither seems to be real. Perhaps such is
metaphorical of his world today.