At the end of September 2010, Jumaldi Alfi started his artist residency program at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI), an institution that actively encourages new practices in contemporary art, especially in print and papermaking techniques. Through the support of equipment, technology, and outstanding technical skills provided by the experts at STPI studio, Alfi had the great opportunity to explore a wide range of possibilities, transforming the visual compositions he has created in his paintings into prints.
The end of 2010 until the first half of 2011 was a busy and productive time for Alfi. A few weeks before his residency at STPI, Alfi had completed a series of paintings, installations and videos which he presented in a solo exhibition titled Life / Art # 101: Never Ending Lesson. The exhibition was held in Yogyakarta (September 2010), and later Kuala Lumpur and Singapore (in cooperation with the Valentine Willie Fine Art). A number of prints made at STPI’s studio are closely linked to this particular body of work in terms of ideas and visual themes due to the short time period between preparing for his solo exhibition "Life / Art # 101" and working at STPI’s studio; while many other new works are representing a variety of visual elements that had been familiar in his paintings in different ways, techniques, and medium.
A number of Alfi’s prints from his STPI residency were later exhibited in a solo exhibition "Melting Memories" (STPI, February 29-March 26, 2011). As Alfi was very prolific at STPI, he had produced a large number of works but could not fit all the works into one show. Now, the public in Jakarta has the opportunity to view these interesting prints, a number of which have not been exhibited at the STPI show. Selected paintings with visual themes related to Alfi’s print works complement this presentation. They reveal Alfi’s intense focus while working with specific visual themes, and encourage the audience to compare the different ways in which Alfi has employed and played with differing techniques and media in his visual exploration.
The essay below, taken from the exhibition catalogue "Melting Memories", attempts to explain the thematic continuity of Alfi's works so far, and how a number of visual themes reemerged, overlapped, filling in the layers of ink and paper of his print works.
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ALFI: In Layers and in Prints
Few among us may know that Alfi—who has made a name as a painter—had wanted to learn printmaking when he enrolled at the Indonesian Arts Institute, Yogyakarta, in 1993. He had been learning about painting since he was a student at the Arts College (SMSR) Yogyakarta, and thought to enrich his visual art skills and knowledge through the study of printmaking. He cleared the entrance exam for the Indonesian Arts Institute, but was not accepted to the printmaking studio. Rather, it was the painting studio that welcomed him. He went on to advance his study of painting, and thus Painting forms the main part of his oeuvre.
At the end of 2010, Alfi’s desire to learn printmaking was fulfilled thanks to a residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute. Alfi enthusiastically answered the invitation to use the numerous printmaking facilities and expertise available at the Institute. Concurrently his latest solo exhibition, “Never Ending Lesson”, was being displayed in Yogyakarta, with subsequent shows in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.
After a series of visits to the studio of the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI), with the full support of their experts, Alfi completed his print works for this exhibition, entitled “Melting Memories”.
The opportunity to take advantage of the various printmaking possibilities at the STPI has encouraged Alfi to record a range of visual elements and themes he had hitherto expressed in his paintings. While the series Never Ending Lesson seems to reveal Alfi’s efforts to move toward fresh themes and visual approaches; his print works constitute an effort to document his aesthetic journey, serving as a record of his past artistic achievement.
Alfi presents this in layers of images and forms, colors and textures, perfectly recorded on the paper surface, well absorbed into its fibers. The layers become never-ending if we realize that the various visual elements and themes that have been so far present in his paintings are also layers and braiding of memories, woven recollections, and reminiscences. The reflections and thoughts of an artist, they embody a series of psycho-biographical traces about the artist’s life experience. Suffice to say that the elements that are directly related to memories form the leitmotif that forms the basis of Alfi’s works.
A caveat must immediately be added: memories are not synonymous with nostalgia for Alfi. While nostalgia is the energy that pulls one into the vortex of the past, Alfi‘s memories and recollections provide the energy that propels and drives him to keep moving in the present while welcoming the future. It is the memories and recollections that come to him in an intense manner, and put him in the midst of the tension between trying to remember and trying to forget, between the meditative calmness and the mind’s distress, between emotional reflections and the jolt of rational awareness, all ultimately pouring into his works. Layered and overlapping ambiguities become the norm in Alfi’s works.
This essay comprises an effort at a brief delineation of the visual elements and themes present in all Alfi’s works. With this illumination, we can trace how Alfi deals with them, summarizes them, and re-presents them on paper, as evident in this exhibition “Melting Memories”.
The chaos of lines, colors, stains, and signs - Since the mid-nineties to the beginning of the 2000s, Alfi’s works reveal his effort to discard the painting trend that strives to achieve clarity of form and visual order. His canvas planes are almost always full of various undercoats, lumps, trickles, drips, and color patches overlapping with a multitude of random lines, outlines, and writing. These are present alongside human figures, torsos, facial fragments, cacti, and lotus blossoms.
The various visual elements that we can recognize at a glance seem to form the centerpiece of his paintings. A moment later, as we are captivated by their simultaneous presence alongside other visual elements, we begin to wonder which ones form the essential elements and which ones the supplementary.
The paintings from this period reveal Alfi’s distress and anxiety about the direction and form his painting practice should take, and his varied technical attempts to achieve a range of visual effects. More importantly, the paintings from this period document the process he has undergone in order to establish a strong foundation for his painting practice. We can still recognize these early elements, which were present during his developmental stages: Alfi’s tendency to employ a range of drawing elements (lines, scratches, scraping, sketches, and scribbling); his penchant and skill in dealing with paints and colors, controlling their saturation as well as their dilution or thickness in order to present layer upon layer of color brushes, trickles, drips, and textures on his canvas.
At the end of the day, Alfi’s works from the initial periods have already revealed how he has a strong tendency to express his emotions, channel his energy, while honing his visual sensitivity in terms of mark-making: to create a chaos of signs almost unceasingly in every single one of his paintings.
A piece of lotus, a cactus, a fragment of horizon, and various scribbling — In the early 2000s, Alfi’s tendency to try to braid together works of a certain theme—or, more loosely, to construct a kind of mood—in a series of works within a certain period became apparent. This was obvious in his solo show “Alfi: Lukis” (Galeri Lontar, Jakarta, 2001).
Nirwan Dewanto, who wrote the introductory essay to the exhibition catalogue, viewed it as Alfi’s tendency to present a quiet, still, and tranquil mood. Nirwan Dewanto wondered, “Every now and then I marvel how the painter is also able to lean toward quietness, solitude, and emptiness, seemingly tired with the disharmony and chaos that he himself has striven to achieve.” If we examine several of his paintings in this period, it is evident that such calmness has to do with the theme of solitude, which drove his painting practice during that time.
In some of his paintings, Alfi presents self-portraits which signify that there is something autobiographical about his works. However, in general he presents such autobiographical elements in symbolic ways. This becomes evident as we observe how he presents a flimsy figure, consisting of lines, seemingly floating in the vast plane of the single-colored canvas. In Alfi’s works from this period we can already recognize the rock-carrying “Sisyphus”. In some other canvases, we can see the shapes of blossoming lotuses, seemingly floating, each quietly alone on the vast plane of canvas full of lines and scribbling.
I once asked Alfi about the atmosphere of his paintings, which pour out chaos while opening on to a vast plane of solitude. Alfi told me that they represented his emotional state when he painted them. To paint, he said, is to conduct a soliloquy, a silent conversation with oneself. Silence, distress, anger are channeled through the brush in his moving hands, almost automatically and without stopping, filling his canvases.
In the subsequent periods, the silent and still undertone acquires increasingly greater prominence and receives special treatments, as evident in his solo show “ALFI” (iPreciation, Singapore, 2006). Meditation Series, is a clear example. This time, Alfi’s keen awareness about painting composition succeeded in reining in the chaos and cacophony that had previously been spread across the planes of his canvases. He has now made compositions of the chaotic and the silent, or, to be precise, created a balance between them.
Alfi admits that his works result from “a desire for calmness, a hope to achieve mental balance.” His treasury of symbols then became better selected and focused on the effort to narrate his desires, emotions, reflections, or personal hopes. The cactus that stands tall on the dry and empty plain is for him, a symbol of “survival, the struggle to live.” He borrows the lotus symbol from Buddhism to explore the issue of calmness and purity of mind. He presents the rock as a carrier of narratives about the beginning and end of presence. (Doesn’t it remind us of one particular folk story from Minangkabau, the land of Alfi’s birth, which tells the story of Malinkundang, a young man who at the end of the story was cursed by his mother and became a rock? And then of course there is also the story of Sisyphus.) Meanwhile, the stairs symbolize the chance for us to get what we are hoping for. Existing alongside these shapes, with the addition of signs and scribbling, is the silence of a fragment of landscape, a line of silent horizon, or a patch of sky with floating clouds.
In some of the canvases in the Meditation Series, we begin to witness how Alfi uses his handwriting intensively, which can often fill the entire canvas plane with lines upon lines of sentences. Some are legible; others more like scribbling or scraping lines that run up and down in a fleeting manner. Some appear like disappearing texts; others overlap with textures and patches of colors.
The sentences, or the crisscrossing handwriting-like lines, became prominent in the series of works Postcard Series (which was also on display in the same exhibition). Here Alfi truly treated his canvas like a chalkboard. He filled the board with writing, drawing, scribbling—repeatedly and incessantly, a person expressing his thoughts and reflections on hundreds or thousands of letters, diaries, or sketches. Such intensive and repetitive acts resemble those of a person doing a dzikir in the tradition of Islam: reading or chanting the holy verses of the Koran in a deep, intense, and solemn manner, repeatedly, until the meaningful sentences begin to sound like a murmur or a drone.
I am comfortable using the dzikir comparison, as in the subsequent series, Sign Series—also displayed in the same exhibition—we can recognize traces of the handwritten sentences that have now become mere residues, patches, and signs. The solemn mood of the dzikir is strongly present in the works that—not accidentally, I presume—were given the title of Rajah Mantra (Mantra Tattoo), which culminates in the perfect stillness of the all-white Rajah Mantra X.
Although we can still perceive the rocks, cacti, and lines of horizon in some works in the series, how he expresses his emotions and thoughts in the text lattice is apparently the most important thing for Alfi. At the same time, he uses the crisscrossing lines as a play of visual elements within the confinement of the painting that is, unavoidably, illusory in nature.
The painting: Between Illusions and Existence, on to the “Melting Memories”— Alfi’s awareness about the illusory nature of painting and a range of possibilities to deal with it in a more advanced manner is manifested in his painting series titled Color Guide Series (Nadi Gallery, Jakarta, 2008).
At a glance, we will recognize similarities between the paintings in Color Guide Series and those of Meditation Series and Postcard Series. There is, however, a fundamental difference: the Color Guide Series—by laying the emphasis on the illusory nature of painting (which paradoxically means affirming its physical presence: “this is a painting”)—actually treats the previous two series as painting objects. That is why, in my introductory note in the exhibition catalogue, I call it Alfi’s effort to “present paintings within paintings.”
Technically, he achieves this by using a simple method. He presents the illusion of a frame in his canvas and further strengthens it with the illusion of an adhesive tape that he paints in great detail, so much so that each time it looks as if we stand face to face with a piece of painting stuck over another painting. The series came about when Alfi started to ask himself the question: “What is painting? Why is it there, and what for?” There was a certain intellectual struggle to question and define the underlying concept of his works so far.
At the same time, however, Alfi could not move far away from the leitmotif of his painting practice. Memories, or everything that is emotional and personal in nature pertaining to his past experiences, still make their appearance.
Thomas J. Berghuis, in his introductory essay to the exhibition catalogue “Color Guide Series”, also recognized this tendency, especially when he observed one of Alfi’s works presenting a line of message: “I knew the moment has arrived to kill the past” (Homage to Beuys, 2007).
Berghuis says: “Viewers who know of the recent past of Alfi’s career will recognize a highly personified undertone lies behind this statement. He is clearly posing a challenge to those who may have thought his days as an artist were numbered, or who feel that he is merely one artist amongst many. Instead, he decided to teach us all a lesson about the compound processes that lie behind the practice of painting. These instructions on painting are marked by its multiple framing, close up screening of the black fence, the painted strips of masking tape, and by imbedding a color palette at the bottom of the canvas. He is teaching us how to look.”
This is thus Alfi’s trademark in relation to his current practice of painting: he still presents a number of issues that are emotional and personal in nature, while at the same time trying to maintain a distance from it all. He uses them as a part of his entire effort to conceptually expand and enrich his painting practice.
This approach became increasingly stronger after he finished his Color Guide Series. In 2009, Alfi preoccupied himself with the effort to finish a number of small paintings with themes related to issues of self-existence. He was moved by the idea of how memories of the past had come to him and made their presence in almost all his works. Is there any particular reason why memories, or the acts of remembering and forgetting, always move his emotions and thoughts as he paints?
Such questions brought Alfi to the theme of “renewal” and “rejuvenation”, summarized in the German term “Verjungung”. Verjungung Series from 2009 brings with it representations of skulls, referring to the “dead” past while simultaneously revealing a new life force. These skulls notwithstanding, Alfi was interested not only in the theme of “death”, but more in the effort to assign meaning to the life he has so far led.
In his own way, Alfi arrived at an understanding about memories and the act of recollection, or that of remembering and forgetting, just as Marcel Proust defined memory—involuntary memory—as an endless flow that fills our lives. Walter Benjamin, in his review of Proust, further affirmed the aspect of renewal and rejuvenation: “This is the work of the memoire involontaire, the rejuvenating force (Verjungung) which is a match for the inexorable process of aging. When the past is reflected in the dewy fresh ‘instant’, a painful shock of rejuvenation pulls it together once more…”
A year later Alfi continued his examination on that issue with an increasingly stronger stance. He wanted to use it as a kind of learning process in life. This is revealed in his 2010 paintings, the Blackboard Series, presenting the blackboard as its main visual element—with the skulls and various lines of text here and there. What needs to be immediately stated here—to show how Alfi’s works are in fact layers of various elements from his previous works—is that the “blackboard” has actually made its presence in his Postcard Series, wherein he filled the plane of his canvas with handwritten lines. The blackboard finds its clear manifestation when Alfi wants to take a clear distance from his past by situating the past within the illusory frame of his painting (in Blur, 2007, and Homage to Beuys, 2007).
The brief explanation above provides us with enough material to track the various elements in Alfi’s works this time, as shown in the exhibition “Melting Memories” today.
Several works appear clearly as collages of elements from his previous works. The printmaking process and procedures enable Alfi to record the various visual elements in a range of ways: duplication, enlargement or shrinkage, cropping, etc. They provide him with opportunities to create collages of more-or-less similar visual elements combined in a range of configurations or in a total play of compositions, to arrive at shifting narrative configurations. In other words, one can say that the printmaking process seems to give Alfi the opportunity to arrange the various visual elements from his previous works in a different mise-en-scène. This is actually in line with Alfi’s tendency to create paintings in a series to convey a single narrative or visual theme. The printmaking process clearly makes it easier for him to create such works. This is evident in the series of works titled Letter to a Painter, Reborn, Renewal, and Melting Memories.
At the same time, Alfi’s painting propensity to play with a variety of textural effects and layers of colors can be expressed in a different way: through the various printmaking processes and the various types of handmade paper. The use of a range of textural effects and layers of color appears prominently in Hope #02, Prayer, I Know the Moment Has Arrived, and A Simple Lesson. Meanwhile, the use of STPI-made special paper, with its thickness and texture, is able to strengthen the presence of the blackboard that has previously appeared in his Blackboard Series (Dirty 1, 2, 3).
It is obvious that the richness in the visual aspects of Alfi’s works this time has truly been made possible thanks to the variety of paper, materials and printing techniques available at the STPI studio. Armed with such varied materials and printing techniques, the illusory nature that Alfi has striven to attain in his paintings can be better achieved through the play between the real and the illusory when he makes the collages. We need to pay close attention to distinguish between the real paper cuts or paper layers, and the images resulting from printing techniques. Alfi further strengthens such illusory nature by presenting pushpin images—just as he has been presenting the masking tape images so far—that for a moment will deceive our sight, forcing us to examine whether the piece of drawing paper presented before us has been really tacked on to the work, or whether it is a product of a certain printing technique.
One must specifically mention how Alfi has successfully presented the rich textures that he usually presents in his paintings. He managed to do this thanks to a special printing technique that print experts at STPI calls ‘collagraphy’. We can examine this excellent technique especially in the series of works Melting Memories, in the paper surface that seems to be covered in dusky, monochromatic, brownish hues, accompanied with scratching and scraping marks, seemingly creating a range of textures. Upon closer observation, however, it will transpire that all these scraping marks are not real; they resulted from the special printing technique of collagraphy, a technique developed by print experts at STPI with the objective of capturing the three-dimensional quality of Alfi’s play of textures onto the flat surface of papers.
We can therefore say that, on the one hand, it will indeed be easy for the audience to enjoy and observe the works in the “Melting Memories” exhibition, especially for those who have seen many of Alfi’s works. A brief reading of the works might bring us to the conclusion that in terms of the visual elements or themes nothing is truly foreign in Alfi’s works this time. On the other hand, the works produced during the residency project at the STPI are able to convince us that the most important thing in the whole process is that Alfi has gained new experiences and knowledge that will enable him to discover further innovations for his works. This has been proven in his print works displayed today. There is a certain fresh quality in the looks of the works, considering Alfi’s visual vocabulary presented in his paintings so far. It is therefore apt to pay our special respect to the experts at the STPI studio who have collaborated with Alfi in a productive and creative manner, enabling him to expand his artistic explorations. Thus, this exhibition also reveals the mastery in the production and processing of paper and the sophisticated printing techniques available at the STPI studio. Alfi’s collaboration with the experts and the STPI team has opened new paths of possibilities for Alfi’s painting practice in the future.
Enin Supriyanto
Curator and Director of Langgeng Art Foundation, Yogyakarta
Foreword from the Gallery
This is the second time for Nadi Gallery to collaborate with Alfi in holding his solo show, this time at the Jakarta Art District.
Several Indonesian artists have been invited to work at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI), but only a few had the chance to exhibit their works in a special show in Jakarta. In 2010, Alfi had the opportunity to be the artist-in-residence at the STPI, and he wanted for the print works he created during his residence to be presented in Indonesia as well. Most of the works on display today are the ones he made during his residence program at the STPI, and some of them have been previously exhibited there. With the addition of several paintings he made at his studio in Yogyakarta, today’s exhibition presents Alfi’s works in a greater diversity.
The works that Alfi has made at STPI form a series of intriguing works as, with the technical assistance and the expertise of the STPI team, Alfi has succeeded in taking advantage of a variety of print techniques and different kinds of paper to present a range of visual elements—lines, colors, textures—which he has achieved so far in his paintings. Some of the works show different kinds of textures that are far richer than what he can ever hope to achieve with his paintings. All in all, Alfi’s experience at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute further confirms Alfi’s position as an artist who is continuously improving and expanding his artistic achievement, as obvious in the print works that he has created during his residence program.
I am grateful to Alfi, who has prepared the works for this exhibition; to Enin Supriyanto, the curator of this exhibition; and to Mr. Fadli Zon, SS., M.Sc, who has been willing to open this exhibition.
Biantoro Santoso
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