CSIS Jakarta

1st - 10th December 2004

CSIS, Jakarta, Indonesia

Karja's last show for 2004, a range of paintings created between the years 2000 and 2004 in many colours was displayed at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies [CSIS] in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia.

I Wayan Karja's minimalist symbolism on view
Jean Couteau - Jakarta Post

It is often said, among lesser souls, that intelligence and knowledge run counter to artistic spirit, and that divine inspiration is never found among men of sane brain and broad learning.

Greater souls know better, as indeed do good artists, too. Da Vinci and Kandinsky were no ignoramuses, nor were Cezanne and Matisse, to mention but a few whose names have left, beside paintings, traces of written intelligence, and even genius.

Yet few Indonesian artists -- Soedjojono and Nashar being exceptions -- have ever theorized, and still fewer Balinese.

None of the latter, no Balinese painter, to this day, has taken a step backward to ponder for a while on his own works and say: "This is what I am doing, and here is the reason."

None has ever shown himself as being fully "conscious" of the world he was expressing and of the changes of which his works were the harbinger.

All have followed the mood of their day, and been at best silent witnesses -- always in images and never in words.

That is now changing.

I Wayan Karja, 39, is a young artist from Ubud and lecturer at the ISI of Denpasar (Denpasar School of Art). He is as good in the dialectics he shows between work and explanation and between art and theory, as in the quality of his paintings proper, reconciling Balinese art with knowledge and intelligence.

At first glance, Karja's works appear to be minimalist-abstract. They display a slow mutation, Srihadi-like, that is in infinite gradations, of color nuances into one another.

This transformation creates a circular movement that brings to mind a mandala -- a Hindu symbolic representation of the world.

But instead of accumulating symbolic details (deities, monsters etc), as seen throughout the Hindu-Buddhist world, we see mandala reduced to its core, representing the unending movement of cosmic forces.

In some paintings a "cleft" in the middle of the canvas conveys the idea of rwa bhinneda (the unity of opposing forces).

Thus, one is far from abstraction: rather, Karja's work represents spiritual philosophy expressed in symbols. A proper term for this style might be "minimalist symbolism".

Karja is not the first to use the discoveries of modern art to convey a "Balinese" symbolic message. Since Nyoman Erawan in the 1980s, many Balinese artists have presented in their works Balinese concepts and concerns dressed up in a modernist garb.

Their attitude, however, was different to Karja's: it was reactive: more a claim of "Balinese identity" than a visual affirmation of Hindu spirituality.

The "checkered cloth", "mountain symbol" or "barong eyes" motifs found in their paintings serve more as an affirmation of "Balineseness" than as a spiritual reflection.

These motifs express the helplessness of artists whose culture has been debased by exoticism and who take refuge in esoteric Balinese symbolism as the last resort of their threatened identity.

Nothing is like this with Karja. His symbolism is no refuge. It is the manifestation of a coherent world view, that of a man and artist with a clear mind and strong creative power.