Lot Essay
Christine Ay Tjoe is one of Indonesia's most prominent female artist, known for her emotionally charged abstract works that seek to express an internal world of thoughts, emotions, struggles, and pain, inadvertently exposing the dark underbelly of the artist's psyche. Her works have been described as being delicate to the point of fragility yet aggressively distorted and disorderly. While visually seductive, her works engage with abject subject matter, at tempting to connect with our most powerful emotions and deep-seated psychological fears.
In The Dark Cloud Only Exist Two Second (Lot 203), Ay Tjoe scratches layer after layer of sharp angular lines that express a physical urgency and agitation. Strong, visible brushstrokes reenact her chaotic energy, morphing beauty into despondence and equilibrium tips into disharmony. Conscious of a balance between positive and negative space, the bare canvas is deliberately left untouched in areas, almost as space for contemplation and moments of repose around the 'accidental' dark figure that dominates the centre of the work, looming ominously over us like the dark cloud suggested in the title.
The canvas records Ay Tjoe's angry attack, as her battle with the surface reads as haphazard patches of black, red and blue. The title seems to suggest the presence of hope amidst apparent futility – the gloomy central figure is surrounded and contained by the white of the bare canvas and the small but intense washes of colour in the upper right corner, spreading in defiance of the authority assumed by the aggressively blacken area. If it is universal human experience that Ay Tjoe is concerned with articulating in her works, it is in her passionate embodiment of those personal sentiments that she is able record and respond in depth.
In The Dark Cloud Only Exist Two Second (Lot 203), Ay Tjoe scratches layer after layer of sharp angular lines that express a physical urgency and agitation. Strong, visible brushstrokes reenact her chaotic energy, morphing beauty into despondence and equilibrium tips into disharmony. Conscious of a balance between positive and negative space, the bare canvas is deliberately left untouched in areas, almost as space for contemplation and moments of repose around the 'accidental' dark figure that dominates the centre of the work, looming ominously over us like the dark cloud suggested in the title.
The canvas records Ay Tjoe's angry attack, as her battle with the surface reads as haphazard patches of black, red and blue. The title seems to suggest the presence of hope amidst apparent futility – the gloomy central figure is surrounded and contained by the white of the bare canvas and the small but intense washes of colour in the upper right corner, spreading in defiance of the authority assumed by the aggressively blacken area. If it is universal human experience that Ay Tjoe is concerned with articulating in her works, it is in her passionate embodiment of those personal sentiments that she is able record and respond in depth.