.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
I think painting as a medium and being a painter is not significant anymore … I think of it as a painting universe. It reminds me of the universes of Marvel or DC Comics: a parallel universe with its own logic, fandom, villains, vigilantes and superheroes. When I make my paintings I feel like I live in a sanctuary, shelter or castle. It’s a nostalgic, lonely, but safe place.
Gede Mahendra Yasa
The point of entry into Gede Mahendra Yasa’s works, especially in the present painting, After Paradise Lost, may seem forbidding, what with the absolute proliferation of details, references to art, art histories and artists contained within the work. But in fact, Mahendra Yasa’s works are extremely relevant to contemporary audiences who, in the face of great stride in the advancement of technology, increasingly find refuge in history.
After Paradise Lost confronts big and detailed aspects of history squarely. If it references English poet John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the poet’s magnum opus that concerns the Biblical story of the Fall of man, it references it by guiding us towards a Balinese worldview, where traditional painting is in essence about narration. At its essence, be it in the West, or its dichotomy of the East, a central function of painting is to narrate and to describe.
Mahendra Yasa has observed that ‘[s]ometimes we just pretend that the boundary/dichotomy between East
and West doesn’t exist. I think the best thing for me to do is to learn about Western art and at the same time learn about our own identity, whatever “identity” means now. I’m a Balinese Indonesian, and we have our own traditional Balinese painting. I think I could learn a lot from our history.’
After Paradise Lost brings us into the world of Balinese, and Indonesian art, where significant Indonesian modern and contemporary artists and artworks find their existence in the pictorial (and narrative) space of the large-sized painting. The audience spots a retelling of Raden Saleh’s landmark mid-19th century painting, The Arrest of Prince Diponegoro,and close to it - in a different period and context – is a rendition of Belgian artist Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur’s painting muse Ni Pollok in a classic reclining pose beneath an orange parasol. In the Balinese pictorial space, time and space is seemingly compressed and brought onto one same plane.
After Paradise Lost is arguably the artist’s most accomplished work in his Post-Bali series where he seeks to explore the potential and limits of realist miniature painting and traditional Balinese painting. He learns and recreates the dense, overflowing composition of traditional Balinese painting, but infuses episodes and characters from a multitude of disparate references. This is a further development from his longstanding interest in painting, its vocabulary, and its processes.
Ever since his works caught the attention of the Indonesian and Asian contemporary artworld in the mid-2000s, he has maintained a steadfast interest in examining and calling to attention issues, questions and discourse about painting. He stands out from other Indonesian artists in this regard, maintaining a conceptual bent to his art-making.
Gede Mahendra Yasa
The point of entry into Gede Mahendra Yasa’s works, especially in the present painting, After Paradise Lost, may seem forbidding, what with the absolute proliferation of details, references to art, art histories and artists contained within the work. But in fact, Mahendra Yasa’s works are extremely relevant to contemporary audiences who, in the face of great stride in the advancement of technology, increasingly find refuge in history.
After Paradise Lost confronts big and detailed aspects of history squarely. If it references English poet John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the poet’s magnum opus that concerns the Biblical story of the Fall of man, it references it by guiding us towards a Balinese worldview, where traditional painting is in essence about narration. At its essence, be it in the West, or its dichotomy of the East, a central function of painting is to narrate and to describe.
Mahendra Yasa has observed that ‘[s]ometimes we just pretend that the boundary/dichotomy between East
and West doesn’t exist. I think the best thing for me to do is to learn about Western art and at the same time learn about our own identity, whatever “identity” means now. I’m a Balinese Indonesian, and we have our own traditional Balinese painting. I think I could learn a lot from our history.’
After Paradise Lost brings us into the world of Balinese, and Indonesian art, where significant Indonesian modern and contemporary artists and artworks find their existence in the pictorial (and narrative) space of the large-sized painting. The audience spots a retelling of Raden Saleh’s landmark mid-19th century painting, The Arrest of Prince Diponegoro,and close to it - in a different period and context – is a rendition of Belgian artist Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur’s painting muse Ni Pollok in a classic reclining pose beneath an orange parasol. In the Balinese pictorial space, time and space is seemingly compressed and brought onto one same plane.
After Paradise Lost is arguably the artist’s most accomplished work in his Post-Bali series where he seeks to explore the potential and limits of realist miniature painting and traditional Balinese painting. He learns and recreates the dense, overflowing composition of traditional Balinese painting, but infuses episodes and characters from a multitude of disparate references. This is a further development from his longstanding interest in painting, its vocabulary, and its processes.
Ever since his works caught the attention of the Indonesian and Asian contemporary artworld in the mid-2000s, he has maintained a steadfast interest in examining and calling to attention issues, questions and discourse about painting. He stands out from other Indonesian artists in this regard, maintaining a conceptual bent to his art-making.