R E A C H
Sin Sin Fine Art @ Art Basel in Hong Kong  |  23 May - 23 June 2013

Revelations of Night and Day: The Paintings of Andy Dewantoro and M. Irfan
by Valerie C. Doran

Viewing the paintings of Andy Dewantoro and M. Irfan, is to feel as though one is journeying between night and day—literally, figuratively, and metaphorically. Dewantoro’s haunting, shimmering landscapes, painted in a reductive palette of black, grey, and white, seem infused with the cold luminescence of moonlight. Dewantoro’s intelligent brushwork creates an effect that is at once impressionistic and strangely cinematic, at the same time lending to acrylic and canvas the subtle tonality and wash-like layering of ink painting. Viewed at a stark distance, the only trace of human presence in these shadowy worlds is found in the spectre of singular, isolated houses hovering on the enigmatic edges of the natural world: a modernistic box of a house with huge empty windows, perched on a cliff (Silenced by the Night #1, 2013), or a farmhouse-style compound seeming to dissolve against the background of an encroaching forest (When The Lights Go Out, 2013). Even Dewantoro’s lone sculpture in the show, The Forgotten (2011), a resin maquette of an old factory building, seems spectral, remote and moonlit. These buildings seem empty, yet somehow not wholly abandoned, as though an imprint of their absent inhabitants still lingers, bound within the structure, having become part of its metaphysical architecture, its walls of memory.

The dream-like quality of Dewantoro’s compositions derives also from the artists’ particular process of construction. He builds his images from the juxtaposed shards of his own visual experience: the architecture of European cities, the suburbs and forests of Indonesia, photographs he has taken in his travels, paintings by Turner and Constable, random images encountered on the street or on the Internet. Yet somehow his landscapes seem both authentic and strangely familiar. Dewantoro is painting a recognizable moment of stasis: the structures we once built and inhabited, on the verge of being reclaimed by the wilderness both within and outside us.

In contrast to Dewantoro’s auratic worlds, Irfan’s mixed-media paintings are super-realistic, sharply focused depictions of precise, mechanical structures — tightly framed views of the girders of bridges (Jembatan, Strong) and portrait-like depictions of the kinds of tools used to construct them (Alat Bantu #1, Alat Bantu #2, 2013)). Irfan paints structures he has known, touched, and travelled across. The bridge, for example, is one he has visited and photographed many times on the island of Java. Like Pop artists before him, Irfan’s process is to remove the man-made object from any background or context, and depicts it as pure, unadulterated subject. His precisely rendered images appear clean-edged and solid, brightly illuminated in the full light of day. Yet what gives Irfan’s work its unique brilliance — and sets him apart from the Super-realist or Pop artist—is the way his eye does not stop at the surface, but continues to zoom in ever more deeply, moving beyond the precise configurations of plane and construct to a deeper investigation of the cellular terrain within. As he paints the variegated shades of metal, the patches of rust, the pattern of random scratches, the spaces between the joins, he reveals interior maps of form, colour, movement, energy. In his paintings, one discovers not only the structural beauty in the ordinary, but also a whole existential cosmos embedded within the materiality and historicity of a girder or a wrench.

It is interesting to note that it was the artists themselves who initiated the idea of exhibiting their work together. By their own account, Dewantoro and Irfan had previously known of and admired each other’s work, but had never had the chance to meet. When in the recent past Dewantoro had occasion to travel to Yogyakarta, they arranged a meeting and spent hours talking together, discovering many shared sensibilities—not least a strong spiritual faith (both are from deeply religious Muslim backgrounds). The pull they felt in each other’s work can be understood, for even as the approach and style of their works differ so dramatically, connections are apparent on other, deeper levels. In both artists’ work, representations of the human form are virtually absent: yet the human presence is tangible in the strong existential pull between the viewer and the vision represented. Confronted with their imagery, one feels transported, as though one had once looked through the empty windows of that house; or moved beneath the soaring girders of that bridge.

Irfan’s vision is forward-moving, investigative, revelatory, pulling us along with him as he zooms ever deeper in to reach the cellular energy at the core of things. Dewantoro’s momentum by contrast is backward: like a cinematographer pulling the camera away, he reveals man’s constructions as framed by the passage of time and by future dissolution: this is a momentum leading ultimately towards entropy. Yet even as Irfan and Dewantoro take us along these divergent visual and philosophical routes, they bring us ultimately to the same place: a recognition of the primal energy from which all things derive and to which all things submit.

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Valerie C. Doran is an independent curator, writer and translator specializing in the field of contemporary Asian art with an interest in cultural cross-currents and comparative art theory. A longtime resident of Hong Kong, Valerie is currently based in Boston, USA where she is researching memory palaces.