Two minds come together 'In-Contro'

Adrian Smith, Contributor, Jakarta

When it comes to culture, Italy isn't just about Roman ruins.

"We want to encourage young people to engage with modern Italian culture," said the Italian Ambassador to Indonesia, Alessandro Merola.

And that means going abstract, if the photography exhibition In-Contro is anything to go by.

As the title suggests, it is the meeting of two artistically inclined minds from very different cultural backgrounds.

"This is the first time that we have brought one of the most up-to-date artists from Italy (Marco Amorini) together with an Indonesian artist (Nico Dharmajungen) to reflect the evolution of art in our increasingly global world" said the ambassador.

In Contro means "meeting" but in the context of the exhibition title, with its additional connecting hyphen, it is intended as a pun; a juxtaposition of one against the other.

At what point these minds meet is a matter of interpretation and debate though.

In immediate stylistic terms, while Amorini's 10 photos come across as grainy, color soaked video stills, Nico's 12 are decidedly detailed and full of clarity, though his flowers break the mold, being all afuzz and blurred.

The photos are also mostly serialized, from Amorini's set of building details entitled Citta Immaginaria (Imaginary City) and ghost-like wispy Hide Entity human close-ups to Nico's blurry flower series, his black-and-white nudes and couple of navel close-ups bizarrely entitled Trilogy Seafood.

The only thematic overlap is of a modern office building; Nico's photo is black-and-white and detailed to the point of unrecognizability. Amorini's skyscraper is in color, angular and soaring.

Born in Rome in 1961, Marco Amorini still lives and works there. His greatest claim to fame is as an Italian representative at EXPO 2000 in Hannover, Germany.

According to him, his work involves a combination of video and photography, which he uses "to explore the relationship between human bodies and architecture, both as emotional and internal conditions".

All roads lead to Rome, as the saying goes, but for Amorini they take a more abstract route: What you see is not necessarily what you get in his work.

In the Italian's scheme of things, what may at first seem like a building or a body, can be viewed in infinite ways by focusing on their details, which open the doors of perception.

And with such tools you can "disassemble/assemble an identity of the multi-faceted human being", which he likens to the complex relations between humans and architecture.

On the other hand, Nico, born in 1948, despite having spent 25 years studying and working in Europe, takes a less deconstructionist approach.

According to the photographer, "Amorini and I differ in that we come from different cultures. My work is touched with eastern tradition, which is less direct in its approach to a subject."

Nico's nudes could be a case in point. The soft curves of the female body are contrasted with the angular edges of an adorning metallic object in Nude #1 and a block adjoined with stiffly crumpled tissue paper in Nude #2.

"I wanted to capture the body as a sculpture, so I made the photos as artistically as possible, not as straightforward portraits."

Two other photos, including Trilogy Body Part II center on a woman's navel, the focus point of the belly button contrasted with curving tentacle-like lines, one of which turns out to be a slimy squid!

As this example goes to show, these are not immediately accessible works. As the ambassador pointed out, "these are works of art that are told in a different way. They arouse less of an immediate response in the viewer than classical art, yet are provocative and challenging in their own way".

The photography exhibition In-Contro is being held at the Instituto di Cultura-Jakarta, Jl. HOS Cokroaminoto 117, Menteng, until March 6, and will be on display at the Grand Hyatt hotel, Yogyakarta on March 8 and the Grand Hyatt hotel in Denpasar, Bali on March 13. Tel: 3927531