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WELCOME To my Web Site...
Scenes of someone
being assaulted by mosquitoes, a person being attacked by a dog, babies
wetting their bed... these are all settings of life we can see
everyday--what is so special about them? But it is another matter when
the simple actions, the daily acts--natural, spontaneous, and honest as
they are--appear on the canvas with a mesmerizing visual language.
Viewers are then asked to have a dialogue with such simple and common
things, amidst the ubiquitous nonsense, dishonesty, and political
babbles.
Fadjar Djunaedi has been doing this for a long time.
The artist has been exploring daily activities as subjects for his
paintings. Fadjar's home environment, still strongly communal, has
apparently sharpened his sensibility for simple, natural, and honest
ways of life. It does not mean, however, that his works are simple. On
the contrary, they are done quite intricately and in many layers.
Fadjar's
visual idioms are present in a unique way. He deforms the human shape
by disproportionately enlarging and compressing parts of the body. The
result is a new form that bears the image of a "big guy." The finding
of such new form, which can indeed seem comical, is initially inspired
by the picture of Ade Rai's body--Ade Rai being a famous Indonesian
body builder--in Tabloid Bola, a sport tabloid Fadjar often reads.
Although
the shape deformations have nothing to do with the trinity of the shape
portrayed, the meaning behind the shape, and the actual reality, one
can still find the relations among these three matters in Fadjar's
paintings. However, Fadjar is actually painting merely to find the
right visual idioms that will enable him to express his thoughts about
the daily life. With his unique imagery of the deformed bodies, one can
sense the humor, the parody, and the comic in his paintings. Fadjar's
works, therefore, appear to be witty and critical.
See the
painting LARASATI in this page. How funny the picture looks! A man with a
large body and with small head looks terrified as a dog is chasing him, and the dog manages
to bite off parts of his trousers. We can read this picture in various
ways. We can, if we want, interpret the dog as the people, and the
terrified man as the power-holders. The picture can therefore mean how
the people are angry and demanding their just share to the
power-holders, who have often robbed them. But, once again, Fadjar does
not actually want to say as much. He merely wants to paint the picture,
without any political meanings. He wants to portray exactly the
simplicities of life.
Such simplicity can also be seen in the
painting Experiment (2003). A heavily built man is comically playing
with a mouse, dipping the poor animal into a yellow glass, so that the
mouse's head becomes yellow as well. We are then free to interpret this
painting. Let us say, for example, that the man represents the power of
the people, and the mouse represents the person who has been eating up
the people's money. The painting can therefore mean that the people are
catching the corrupt official, and after a close inspection, find out
that the official is from the "yellow party."
Indeed, Fadjar
visual idioms are focused on the shapes and the movements of the body.
The background remains empty but still in unity with the scenes he is
depicting. At the end, Fadjar finds effective and unique visual idioms
that becomes so characteristic of him; one that goes hand-in-hand with
his tendency to see his fellow humans with a sense of humor.
Djuli Jati Prambudi (Art Curator)
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