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Earthly Evocations: |
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M. Irfan
by Valerie C. Doran ©2012 Muhamad (M.) Irfan was born in 1972 in Bukittinggi, West Sumatra. He currently lives and works in Yogyakarta. Irfan studied painting at the Indonesia Institute of Fine Arts and in the mid-1990s was a founding member of the Jendela Art Group, which sought to expand the range of the visual and conceptual language of painting. Since that time, Irfan has worked independently in a variety of media, including painting, sculptures and constructions, and experimented with styles from surrealism and Op art to cerebral formalism and photorealism. But regardless of the style, in every work, the artist seeks—and almost always attains-- a kind of technical perfection in which one discerns a level of deliberation and meticulous calculation that borders on engineering and craft. What gives Irfan’s art its unique power is the fusion of this technical virtuosity with a kind of visual framing that imparts a particular, philosophical point of view. Over the last few years, Irfan has focussed on creating detailed depictions of bridges, railroad tracks, locomotives, airplanes—manufactured, objective, unemotional structures which are yet fraught with complex subtexts of departure or homecoming, motion or stasis, travel or displacement, reunion or separation. It is particularly in his paintings of bridges that a quality of philosophical questioning is most apparent. Invariably, when he frames the image for a painting it is always a tightly cropped, close-up view. In Time and Motion and The Power of Right (both 2012), depicting the same railroad bridge near the ancient temple of Prambanan, we see every detail of the bridge’s structure: the rusted quality of the metal, the complex criss-cross of the girders, the condition of the tracks. Irfan’s focus imparts a quality of grandeur that makes these humble bridges seem monumental, almost cathedral-like. At the same time, the intensity of the linear perspective gives us the feeling that we are just about to step -- or be sucked—into a kind of vortex, a portal to the other (unknown) side. Irfan’s painterly approach here is equally ambiguous and captivating. He infuses the almost super-realist imagery with an essential quality of formalism in the texturing, created through a beautiful and subtly complex manipulation of brushwork and colour that creates an abstract microcosm, a whole other visual language within the super-realist macrocosm.  The Color of Right | Mixed Media on Canvas | 175x225 cm | M. Irfan©2012  Time and Motion | Mixed Media on Canvas | 170x220 cm | M. Irfan©2012
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