Van den Ham's creations embody the essence of nature

By Parvathi Nayar Narayan

JAKARTA (JP): After seeing Dale Chihuly's brilliant and sometimes quirky masterpieces in blown, shaped glass, I never looked at the medium with the same eyes again. Chihuly, the leading exponent of glass in the United States, formed a whole new expressionistic quality. Currently on show in Jakarta are the glass works of another talented artist, Frank van den Ham from the Netherlands. He too manages to place a contemporary and a personal stamp on his creations in glass.

One of life's constants is the immutable law of nature that anything born must eventually decay and die. It has been suggested that Frank van den Ham's glass objects embody the essence of nature, containing elements of birth, decay and decomposition.

With fluid shapes and luminous colors, it is hard to imagine his work representing anything as absolute or grim as death. However the fragile nature of the material and the uneven, irregular edges of the works suggest the organic process of decomposition. The resonance is not ugly or fear inducing, but is the flow of life, bearing neither malice nor goodwill.

Untitled # 7, opaque glass with shades of red inside and blues outside, is an example. Its long tulip shape has many examples in the exhibition, though here the edges are exceptionally uneven.

Or take a piece of work like Bertemu (meeting), two halves of a spheroid that confront each other. One half is made of wood, the other of pale aquamarine glass. Inevitably, this brings to mind the egg, broken to release the life it contains, leaving in its wake pieces of eggshell; the creation-destruction image rolled into one.

Similar in form but more complex is Rindu (longing), one of the most elegant pieces on show. It is "eggshell halves" made of fine gray glass, so delicate it looks like gray crystallized water. At the centers of the two halves are curved objects in bold red and flecked, smoky gray. Pikir Tentang Hidupnya (thinking about life) is another step in complexity exploring the same theme, this time in aqua-colored and spotted art glass, gold and wood.

Indeed, these arrangement of glass objects gives them the impression of being small installations. Sometimes the glass is in combination with other elements like wood, or even fabric -- as in Ikat Ikut.

Another interesting arrangement is Banten which looks like some impossibly exotic Japanese dish with its exaggeratedly elongated glass chopsticks. Glass halves (reminiscent of crab shells?), and flattened discs in iridescent green, orange and red, with touches of gold, are arranged on a gray plate.

Van den Ham uses the recently-rediscovered, but ancient, technique of glass fusing. He melts together different pieces of colored glass, obtaining an interlocking overlaid effect. In Untitled # 6 the shades of green are like lush foliage. Putra Bali (son of Bali) looks like checked material made up into a blouse and stole with silver attachments.

In Untitled # 15, the check motif is subtly enmeshed in the glass form itself, in emeralds and blues. In the reflections created by the passage of light through the vase form, pale mauves are seen as well. Proper lighting is of course very important to show off the pieces to their best advantage; light not only brings life to the colors but also creates beautiful colored shadows.

Frank van den Ham was born in Amsterdam in 1952, and is essentially a self-taught artist. Successful as an artist working with glass, he is in fact one of the few artists in the Netherlands who is able to make a living from his art alone. His works on show are priced in the range of Rp 900,000 to Rp 3.8 million.

Van den Ham has had several solo exhibitions at home and abroad. He has come often to Indonesia, exhibiting last year at the Hilton Executive Club. He loves to look at the Indonesian people and watch them at work, because he is basically inspired by people.

This is in direct contrast to Auke de Jong, a painter whose work is shown along with Van den Ham's. De Jong is inspired by nature. He first visited Indonesia in 1988, was deeply influenced by the scenery he saw around him, and started painting landscapes. Earlier he had experimented with large format expressionistic paintings.

Even though the two artists' works are completely different, De Jong's work does suffer in comparison with Van den Ham's crystal clear color and flowing forms. Though De Jong himself uses an extensive palette, the colors tend to look a little murky and muddied.

The paintings Air Saneh and Borobodur illustrate De Jong's technique of employing vigorous daubs of color. There is energy but no visual focus to the work. Of the landscapes, Ganga and Dieng Plateau are the most successful. However, Potret is an interesting picture -- here, the slashes and swirls of color do coalesce. The viewer is drawn into the painting of a person's face looking down. Potret comes together in a way that many of the others like Stoffen Vrouw do not. De Jong's work is priced between Rp 800,000 and Rp 9 million.

The works of Frank van den Ham and Auke de Jong are on view at the Erasmus Huis, Jl. H.R. Rasuna Said, Kav. S-3, Kuningan, until 1 May 1996. Admission is free.