Klik GAMBAR Dibawah Untuk Lebih Info

Sumber Asal Berita :-

The Star Online: Lifestyle: Arts & Fashion

Posted: 22 Oct 2011 11:39 PM PDT

The grand old man of Indonesian modern art is finally appearing on our shores.

THE eyes, pitch black and scratchy, stare out of the portrait even as they are stared at, and delves at the same time into the innermost soul of the person portrayed. It's as if the eyes have been gouged out. They have no eyeballs.

Uncannily psychological, these paintings bear the signature style of Jeihan Sukmantoro, Indonesia's super-meister artist.

"We are all walking and working in darkness and mystery. We don't know where we are going, what will happen tomorrow," Jeihan explains his trademark black eyes.

"Its use is also related to Futurism. There will come a time when everyone will have to wear black soft lenses to defuse the bright sunlight coming through a dangerously thin ozone layer."

Those eyes give the subject an enigmatic aura, even a sense of foreboding. They also create mystique and diminish the physical and the mass. Jeihan's figures are disarmingly flat and often "suspended" like modern-day wayang kulit characters but with unseen prop sticks. As with wayang kulit, the background colours reflect the positive-negative play basking in the light. Everything is kept minimalist, as if to re-emphasise the basics – there is a sheer purity of colours and lines.

The background, in monochrome, duo-tone or tricolour, makes the subject seem to float in an ambiguous space, what Jeihan aptly describes as "out of time and out of place".

As windows to the soul, Jeihan's painted eyes are a black hole of emotional DNA. Shaded and concealed, they reveal the inner psyche from which the subject looks out at the world – prescient moments somehow shared with the artist.

The blackened eyes, which started with a 1965 work, Gadis, also extend to animals, mostly cats. Girls or boys, all get the same "Marilyn Monroe" lipstick.

At his vast studio-gallery complex at Pasirlujang in Bandung – which encompasses an open basement studio with a billiards table and another indoor studio in a nearby bungalow – Jeihan cuts a strangely solitary figure. He moves around in the space almost like he's sliding in slow-mo, sometimes exiting and suddenly appearing again.

For a 73-year-old, he's agile, making his way confidently up the stairs of the three-and-a-half storey main building to the first floor where we are to talk.

He talks excitedly and quickly (just like he paints, daughter Ivy points out) but never unthoughtfully; he comes across as a deep thinker, with a clarity that overcomes fossilised old ways.

A rebel known for his skirmishes with conservative authorities during his Institute of Technology, Bandung days from 1960-66, Jeihan has beaten the odds to prove that one doesn't need a piece of paper to be hugely successful as an artist and to achieve greatness.

He lives with his family in a palatial home some 10 minutes away from the studio. With his wife, Sri Sunarsih, he has six children – Ata, Adi, Aga, Aryo, Ivy, Dr Iya (Ila, the youngest, died when she was 10 months old).

For the blessings in his life, Jeihan gives back to the community. His studio complex has a community mosque (he has built another in nearby Cicadas) and a public library, performance pavilion, studio galleries and quarters for young artists.

Versatile creativity

He paints mostly in oil, and since the 1990s, a little bit with acrylic too. He is also adept at pottery, woodcuts, sculptures (copper and wooden), watercolours, pastels and drawings.

Jeihan is also a published poet (MATA mBeling Jeihan, publisher: PT Grasindo, 2000), founding mBeling in 1970. It's known for ignoring the straitjacket of iambic pentameters to create light onomatopoeia and loose text-play pictorialism, or "thoughts Lego". For instance:

Mukadimah Puisi mBeling (1971)

"Sajak ya sajak

Jejak ya jejak

Sajak cari jejak

Jejak cari sajak

Biarkan

Yang jejak, jejak

Yang sajak, sajak."

Jeihan's "hollowed eyes" signature also extends to his life-sized copper sculptures of standing or reclining figures. They have titles like Abortion, Meditation, Hermaphrodite, Masturbation.

He had also carved figurative outlines in wood, including one in 1968 which became an art statement of two pieces when he "decapitated" the figure.

In the 1970s, he also fired clay ceramics, imaginatively playing with shapes as functional vessels or merely as whimsical showpieces.

During that period, he combined the cut and thrust of the palette knife with the elegance of brush strokes in works like his Boat Series, while the earlier Aku, from 1955, brims with raw, intense and aggressive cuts.

His Boat Series and also his Sunflower Series (2000) and a few of his Balinese Dancer Series are noted for their subtle use of drips.

While his paintings are centred on the eyes, they are not his main quest in his portraits. "It's the aura. I want to catch the aura of a person," he confides. "Everyone has an aura."

To demonstrate his painting style (which is very unlike the romantic, naturalistic "Mooi Indie" tradition of say, Basuki Abdullah), he hurries his workers to gather his materials. Squatting on the floor like a bird, he does a quick portrait of me with only daubs of yellow, white and black on a plywood board while his worker holds up the canvas. In five minutes, he completes the portrait – and what a searching portrait it is!

Jeihan has painted dignitaries such as Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudho-yono but it's the ordinary folk in the streets and marketplaces and the solitary portraits of nubile young women that he is most famous for.

"Women have a very unique resonance, a mystique," he says.

His works are the story of that feminine mystique, young women caught in their private moments and in their safe space; vulnerable and innocent and with a rustic charm, yet modern in outlook. His Mother & Child theme perhaps best reflects the Asian Woman known for her high threshold of pain and rock-like stability.

His portraits are all of real people – family members, friends, neighbours, strangers, street kids and musicians. Because of the pallor of their faces, the elegant strokes and the slightly elongated body, a tension is created while the effect is often haunting and mysterious.

The gestures of the spade-like hands, very like his, also decide the mood. His women have hands crossed over bodies, hands on laps, legs crossed, knees raised up to the body, reclining in full abandon, or they are in an awkward pose.

His female forms have been compared to those of Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) because of the elegiac, stretched lines and flat colours.

But Jeihan remarks: "When I held a solo exhibition in Rome (at the Centro D'Alte Culture) in 1975, there was not even a squeak about this, Modigliani being Italian!"

Breaking the rules

Jeihan has also had solo exhibitions in Rotterdam (Holland, 1981), New Jersey (United States, 1982), Zurich (Switzerland, 1983) and Paris (1999).

But his biggest early break came in 1985 when he had an Expressionist "duet" in Jakarta with S. Sudjojono (1913-1986), dubbed the Father of Indonesian Modernism. It jump-started Jeihan's career and indirectly anointed him as Sudjojono's successor.

His exhibition with Srihardi Sudarsono and Nyoman Gunarsa in 1995 in Jakarta was followed by another for the charitable Padmanaba cause in 1997.

Born with silver spoon firmly in mouth on Sept 26, 1938, in Ngampel, Boyolali, near Solo (Central Java), Jeihan picked up painting basics at the Himpunan Badaya Surakarta under his first mentor, Sumitro Hendronoto, from 1953 to 1955; he also had his first solo showing there in 1958.

At six, he suffered a head injury from a fall which kept him out of school for eight years. Although he still has occasional headaches, Jeihan believes that this misadventure triggered the restless creative genie in him.

When he enrolled in the art faculty of the Institute of Technology, Bandung (ITB) in 1960, he quickly rebelled against its policies and curriculum, which he found conservative, archaic, inhibitive and prohibitive.

He had financial problems too by then – his family, once rich (father Widiatmo was a tobacco wholesaler), had lost status, property and fortune during Indonesia's class revolution of 1945.

While struggling with finances, Jeihan also grappled with rules, rules, rules: He couldn't hold exhibitions outside campus, as students were not allowed to; he was doing figurative work while the ITB style stressed Cubism and abstracts; the school was orientated towards producing teachers, not professional artists.

Jeihan's academic years were stretched by the communist purge, the turbulent events of 1965 and President Sukarno's year of vivere pericolosamente ("living dangerously") that finally ended in his downfall and Suharto's ascendency.

Finally, in 1985, one of Jeihan's paintings sold for 50 million rupiahs at an auction.

"The portraits of ordinary people are a celebration of life's infinite little moments and the equilibrium of emotional states between the personal and the immediate environment," says Jeihan, still the art world's consummate soul-catcher after all these years.

And he keeps going: Jeihan will be holding his first Kuala Lumpur exhibition this week at the KL Lifestyle Art Space and his works will also be available at the gallery's booth at upcoming the 5th International Art Expo Malaysia.

● Jeihan Sukmantoro's solo exhibition, Our Being, is currently on at the KL Lifestyle Art Space (No. 150, Jalan Maarof, Bangsar) and will continue until Nov 30. Opening hours are noon to 9pm; for more information, % 03-2093 2668 or go to kl-lifestyle.com.my.

The gallery will have a booth (No.17) at the 5th International Art Expo Malaysia, which will be launched on Friday by Tourism Minister Datuk Sri Dr Ng Yen Yen.

The expo is on from Oct 28 to Nov 1 at the Matrade Exhibition & Convention Centre (Menara Matrade, Jalan Khidmat Usaha, Off Jalan Duta, KL).

For more information, 03-7728 3677, e-mail info@artexpomalaysia.com or go to artexpomalaysia.com.

Full content generated by Get Full RSS.

Kredit: www.thestar.com.my

Isnin, 24 Oktober 2011