Kokok P. Sancoko
(b. 1974 in Nganjuk, East Java, Indonesia)

Kokok P. Sancoko studied painting at the Indonesia Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta (Institut Seni Indonesia). Throughout his artistic practice Kokok has been deeply dedicated to exploring the possibilities of the painting surface through the dissection and intersection of forms and colour, often reducing the image of a concrete object such as an apple or a flower to its most essential planes: in a sense a kind of ‘abstract realism’. In a recent experiment with installation Kokok even attempted to incorporate real human figures within a three-dimensional space into a ‘painting plane’ through the use of a kind of mathematically deduced illusion. In his recent paintings Kokok pushes his explorations further, in an attempt to create a visual, two-dimensional mapping of the multidimensional gradients of the psyche. The juxtaposed images in these atmospheric, gorgeously coloured paintings, rendered in varying degrees of concreteness and translucence, comprise a kind of virtual world of memories, perceptions and impressions of the past, the present and the future.

This approach is compellingly evident in recent paintings such as Aku Mendut, executed in oils, charcoal and pencil on canvas, in which the image of a rough-looking Javanese street singer (and possible prostitute) playing a guitar is accompanied by the ghostly classical figure of a western woman playing the lute, appropriated from a painting by the Italian Baroque-period artist Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652). Gentileschi’s own history as a strong female figure--a successful artist at a time when few women were accepted as such, and also a victim of rape who prosecuted her attacker—seems to be part of the layered psychological narrative of this work, a kind of visual palimpsest in which time, space and memory are simultaneously revealed and compressed.

Has been with Sin Sin Fine Art since 2009.

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Artworks