Kendra Gallery proudly presents Remembrance, a solo exhibition by Wastuwidyawan Paramaputra (born in Jakarta, 1986), a young artist and graduate of the Painting Studio of the Bandung Institute of Technology Faculty of Art & Design (FSRD-ITB), Bandung.
Wastuwidyawan—or Wastu, as he is usually called—is an artist who grew up in an urban and cosmopolitan Indonesian milieu. For the past three years, he has been developing works based on experiences that touch on youth subculture—let's just say the 'clubbing' subculture, which is enacted in the spaces of nightclubs, rave parties and discotheques. For Wastu, clubbing is a social phenomenon that represents the peculiarities of the urban lifestyle. His artworks expose the aesthetics of this world of night and leisure. With human figures as his main objects, Wastu processes people's interactions through gestures and poses, activities in particular spaces, fashions, and articles that constitute the communal identity markers of the subculture.
The Remembrance exhibition represents Wastu's latest artistic explorations. Although they still display realistic imagery, this time Wastu has worked his paintings through a certain visual grammar. Some of them appear in the format of an assymetrical canvas field. The ways in which Wastu selects the point of view, focus and cropping of certain objects enable the narrative markers in his paintings to become all blurred, weird and incomplete. The paintings capture the minutest, most natural and at the same time most random moments of an event, those which are most often forgotten or go unnoticed.
Wastu's proximity to the culture of clubbing has a long back story. For him, the clubbing scene—the rowdiness of music, flash of strobe lights, cigarette smoke, smell of liquo,r and chatter of people in dimly lit spaces—is reminiscent of his mother, who died when Wastu was 11 years old. Aside from creating them as a project in social observation, Wastu's work on these paintings is motivated by a strong personal drive. He uses his work as a medium for digging up memories of the one closest to him, whom he misses most of all.
As an artist who also deals with photography, Wastu has a unique sensibility for catching the moment. If photography can produce images that are purely mementos, then painting may be understood as a medium for provoking and delving into memories in ways that are at once more imaginative, meaningful, and poetic. Last year, Wastu came to realize that through these paintings, he was not only digging up memories of his departed mother but also, of death. Ultimately, the works in the Remembrance exhibition also question ’time’—the totality of the movement of human experience which cannot be repeated. Wastu's most recent paintings demonstrate a unique understanding of painting and photography as media that are mutually interrelated, not only technically, but also, philosophically.
Agung Hujatnikajennong
exhibition curator
