panca warna

18 October - 15 November 2003

Scala Foyer, Basel, Switzerland

Karja, The Power Beyond the Pictures

Like many international artists of our time Wayan Karja, our guest from Bali, is a wanderer between the worlds. At home in Penestanan Kaja, amidst of rice paddies, and at the State Art Academy of Denpasar where he works as a teacher and head of the faculty of visual arts, he finds, astonishingly enough, again and again the time and desire for travels abroad, in order to install exhibitions, to participate in symposiums and workshops and, for a while, also to conduct comparative studies on the symbolic use of colour in other cultures.

In the works which Wayan Karja shows in his third Basel exhibition in the foyer of the Scala Theater, local and global experiences are reflected, Western and Eastern values and world views, and with that also artistic and aesthetic positions which the artist melts together and takes to a new and independent expression. The understanding that what’s one’s own can only win clear outlines and ripen through the encounter with the other finds its visible confirmation in these pictures. In analysing the other we begin to have a premonition of what tells the locally specific from the universal, which connects people with one another and makes it possible for them to have dialogues across the borders of local cultures.

An artist like Wayan Karja needs this intercultural dialogue because it forms the basis of a work in which local and universal values, perceptions and concepts find artistic expression. I know from many years of experience that there still are, here in the West, numerous art lovers who express difficulties in dealing with contemporary non-Western art. For them, modern art of the West is the epitome of universal art, even though it has received – which tends to be overlooked – essential impulses from Asian calligraphy and Zen’s minimalism.

Therefore, in order to prevent misunderstandings that it could, with Wayan Karja’s painting, be about a derivative of Western art, let me try to briefly locate the cultural and biographical site of these paintings, in order to get closer to the world of colours and forms within which the artist moves about, and to learn something about those powers which are effective beyond the canvas’s visible surface.

When we start out from the fact that the artist himself is the site of his paintings, we cannot avoid giving a glance at his biography and some cultural influences which have inscribed themselves into this biography.

Wayan Karja was born, 38 years ago, near South Balinese Ubud, in Penestanan, a village whose life had been determined by rice-growing and small trade, before it evolved, along with the blossoming tourism in the seventies, to become a centre of the so-called “Young Artists”, whose colourful narrative paintings soon were being traded in ethno galleries all over the world. As a five-year-old child prodigy Wayan Karja was successfully in on it, and since then he has never stopped to draw and to paint. After long years of travels and apprenticeship which made him familiar with the basics and contents of traditional Balinese and modern Western painting, Karja now works for ten years as an art teacher at the Denpasar State Art Academy. Since one year he heads the fine art faculty there as its dean. His home and his studio where he works in the evenings and in the early morning hours are located far from his academic workplace, in Penestanan. Thus he still lives and paints at the place of his birth.

As a painter of Balinese everyday life and myths Wayan Karja has grown into Balinese culture much earlier and more intensively than others. Under the influence of Western art theories and practices he began, however, to remember, in the nineteen-hundred-nineties, an artistic way of his own, somewhere between Balinese figuration and Western abstraction. On this road he received, in 1994, on the occasion of his first visit to Basel, the decisive impulse for his plunging into the material and spiritual world of colour: it was the Mark Rothko show at the Beyeler Gallery at Basel’s Bäumleingasse that finally had aroused, within himself, the passion of colour which never has left him ever since.

In Karja’s first Basel exhibition in 1996, amidst many figurative Bali pictures first signs of a more intensive dealing with colour fields and symbolic abstraction were detectible. In the depiction of rice landscapes the artist had found a field of experimentation within which he could free himself of the colour of objects, and work with relatively abstract colour surface structures. When Karja returned to Dornach four years later, the last elements of figuration had disappeared from his painting. In the meantime he had made his fine arts master’s degree at the University of South Florida. In his analysis of abstract expressionism, of colour field painting, and minimalism he had discovered, in the USA, his own way of abstraction along which he didn't’t have to deny his roots.

He dedicated his thesis to the religiously based and ritually important Balinese colour concept of the “Panca Warna”, those five divine basic colours linked to the four points of the compass and the centre: red, yellow, white, and black, and the possibilities to, contemporarily, convert this concept with the means of his art. In Bali these colours gain a special dynamism in that they are related with the customary ritual at all temple festivals, of eight times revolving or circling around the temple, clockwise and in the direction of the four points of the compass. This ritual which creates accordance with God, the universe as macrocosm, and man as microcosm, is called “Pengider Bhuana” in Bali, which stands for “Circling the World”. Then the temple, a mandala, becomes a reduced image of the cosmos. The colour symbols guarantee orientation and create a relationship with the most important divine manifestations: red represents Brahma and the south, black Vishnu and the north, yellow Mahaveda and the west, and white Isvara and the east. In the centre multicoloured Shiva sits enthroned on his lotus seat.

In the meantime Wayan Karja has consequently walked on between the local and the universal, and in so doing he has steadily reduced the symbolic use of colour and form for the benefit of a free, playful and experimental use of colours and the analysing colour spaces which often lend a mythical quality to his pictures.

Wayan Karja’s exhibition titles actually are programs which make clear how much the artist has remained close to the fundamental values of his culture even though, today, universal aspects of the Hindu religion and philosophy interest him more than magic-religious practices of popular belief. “Pengider Bhuana”, “The Circling of the World”, “The Colour of Life”, “Emptiness”, “Panca Warna”, “The Five Cosmic Colours” – are all titles which show that, for this Balinese artist, it is about working out the universal of Balinese culture among other things, and to examine it in art-ethnological comparison with other cultures, with the West, with the West Australian aborigines of Kimberley, or the Navajo Indians in the Southwest of the USA.

But with that Wayan Karja also finds a way to a Balinese, or rather Asian modernity which is different from Western modernity, and which, the way I feel, finds expression in his painting in different ways. Thus his sensitive colour poetry exudes a meditative calmness which I have known as basic attitude of the Balinese, or maybe better: as ideal of a basic attitude for many years. Spiritual and material purity, balance, and harmony are ideals of the Balinese religion which one wants to get closer to through ritual or through meditation. Circular or axial surfaces and lines which we see in numerous of Karja’s works let themselves be interpreted, with the artist’s consent, as centres and axles of the world, and, at the same time, as expression of his own, calm, and self-confident centricity which he finds within the meditative and introspective preparation of his artistic work as well as during his night’s rest.

It is Karja’s objective to let himself become visible as microcosm in his pictures, which adhere to the macrocosm, as a human being and artist for whom it matters not to lose his cool, even in dramatic and economically difficult times, but to guard his attitude, his inner calm, and his balance. It is his hope that these pictures cause something within the viewer, open up something, and add to a new consciousness towards his or her own life. Or, in Karja’s own words: “Colour can be the therapy which helps me to open up, and which shows me the road to a new life.”

The power which is behind these pictures works out of the realm of the invisible, the Niskala as the Balinese say. It is the artist’s task to make this vitality visible in that he awakes the divine spark which enables him to lend to his work radiance, charisma, or Taksu, and with that to cast a spell over human beings.

[Urs Ramseyer]