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拍品专文
Known for his expressionist paintings, Indonesian artist Affandi is widely considered to be one of the most significant modern artists in Asia to come out of the 20th century. His works command a certain vigour and liveliness that reflect the passion that he had for his art. According to art historian Claire Holt, Affandi was an autodidact, who sought to persistently spontaneously express his innermost emotions as he engaged enthusiastically with his subject matter. Indeed his canvases of thickly applied impasto reliefs are a physical manifestation of his expressive spontaneity, applying the paint directly from the tube and working it into the canvas with his bare fingers, palms and wrists to create emphatic swirls and waves in his paintings inspired by wayang kulit. It is due to this technique, that Affandi’s work has always been held up as a leading example of progressiveness in the East and likened to that of post-Impressionist Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh.
Like van Gogh, Affandi painted with his senses and emotions, as opposed to intellect and often giving in to his erudite instincts. Educated during the Dutch colonial period, Affandi began as a naturalist, influenced by the realism of the West that he had become acquainted with. However, he eventually developed what is now known as his signature expressionist style of highly pigmented paintings depicting Indonesian daily life that vibrate with an emotional intensity. For Affandi, there was no need to portray an idealised paradise; deeply connected to his heritage, he was able to see the beauty in the quotidian and translate the essence of each situation or object to the canvas with ease. A man of great sensitivity, Affandi directly observed his environment, delving deep into his subject-matter in order to articulate his initial inspiration and interest in it.
Merapi Landscape (Lot 49) is an exquisite example of Affandi’s landscape paintings that feature one of Indonesia’s most active stratovolcanos, Gunung Merapi , which translates from Javanese into ‘Fire Mountain’. Affandi’s naturalist tendencies emerge as he attempts to capture the implacable volcano and its surrounding landscape from afar. The river, most likely the Gendol River, cuts through the canvas diagonally, languidly circling Mount Merapi and contrasting with the buzz of activity that surrounds the smoking volcano shrouded in fog. The painting is an exceptional representation of a natural feature that Affandi often painted; unlike his other works, he presents Mount Merapi from a wide oblique angle, capturing the beauty of the surrounding lush greenery and the other life forms that make the Indonesian landscape so breathtaking.
In Merapi Landscape , Mount Merapi occupies about a quarter of the canvas, the recalcitrant volcano depicted by Affandi as a slumbering giant, dwarfing all life forms around its foreboding presence. Led by the emphatic outlines of the artist, the eye traces the meandering flow of the river to the focal point of the painting – a mysterious beyond that one is unable to perceive. It is an interesting visual device to have an oblique vanishing point that appears to lead to nothingness, but in fact it forces the viewer to contemplate the formidable nature of Mount Merapi, immersing the viewer in the atmosphere that Affandi himself observed. Since the seventeenth century, the idea of the sublime has been understood as being the unknowable, beyond comprehension and immeasurable. The sublime straddles the seemingly disparate emotional spheres of fear and awe, culminating in a work that has a tension beyond that of a generic picturesque landscape painting as demonstrated in Joseph Wright of Derby’s apocalyptic scene in Vesuvius in Eruption, with a View over the Islands in the Bay of Naples. Affandi achieves a sense of the dramatically massive scale of Mount Merapi and the powerlessness of Man in the face of nature’s elemental forces by depicting the diminutive figures in the centre of the canvas as two indecipherable black blobs, contrasting them with the vastness of their surroundings.
Evoking an alienating landscape, Affandi reminds us of the enormous ability of nature to annihilate. However, Merapi Landscape is also a subtle reminder of the cycle of life and the restorative powers of destruction. Using a rich viridian hue to create the background for the dense foliage, Affandi went over it with lines of impasto to create his iconic tactile imagery, capturing the dynamism of the wind as it combs through the verdure. The artist includes the rich frondescence around Mount Merapi, a reminder that volcanic soil, known as andosols, provides for a mineral-rich soil that promotes the proliferation of vegetation around the area. In fact, hundreds of thousands of people live close to active volcanoes due to the fertile volcanic soil that surround it. As such, these natural features are – for a significant proportion of Indonesian people – part of a complex set of mystical beliefs, and there is a national reverence for them, which Affandi pays homage to in this work. Merapi Landscape is a not a romanticised, but a Romantic representation of the splendour of Indonesia’s landscape.
Like van Gogh, Affandi painted with his senses and emotions, as opposed to intellect and often giving in to his erudite instincts. Educated during the Dutch colonial period, Affandi began as a naturalist, influenced by the realism of the West that he had become acquainted with. However, he eventually developed what is now known as his signature expressionist style of highly pigmented paintings depicting Indonesian daily life that vibrate with an emotional intensity. For Affandi, there was no need to portray an idealised paradise; deeply connected to his heritage, he was able to see the beauty in the quotidian and translate the essence of each situation or object to the canvas with ease. A man of great sensitivity, Affandi directly observed his environment, delving deep into his subject-matter in order to articulate his initial inspiration and interest in it.
Merapi Landscape (Lot 49) is an exquisite example of Affandi’s landscape paintings that feature one of Indonesia’s most active stratovolcanos, Gunung Merapi , which translates from Javanese into ‘Fire Mountain’. Affandi’s naturalist tendencies emerge as he attempts to capture the implacable volcano and its surrounding landscape from afar. The river, most likely the Gendol River, cuts through the canvas diagonally, languidly circling Mount Merapi and contrasting with the buzz of activity that surrounds the smoking volcano shrouded in fog. The painting is an exceptional representation of a natural feature that Affandi often painted; unlike his other works, he presents Mount Merapi from a wide oblique angle, capturing the beauty of the surrounding lush greenery and the other life forms that make the Indonesian landscape so breathtaking.
In Merapi Landscape , Mount Merapi occupies about a quarter of the canvas, the recalcitrant volcano depicted by Affandi as a slumbering giant, dwarfing all life forms around its foreboding presence. Led by the emphatic outlines of the artist, the eye traces the meandering flow of the river to the focal point of the painting – a mysterious beyond that one is unable to perceive. It is an interesting visual device to have an oblique vanishing point that appears to lead to nothingness, but in fact it forces the viewer to contemplate the formidable nature of Mount Merapi, immersing the viewer in the atmosphere that Affandi himself observed. Since the seventeenth century, the idea of the sublime has been understood as being the unknowable, beyond comprehension and immeasurable. The sublime straddles the seemingly disparate emotional spheres of fear and awe, culminating in a work that has a tension beyond that of a generic picturesque landscape painting as demonstrated in Joseph Wright of Derby’s apocalyptic scene in Vesuvius in Eruption, with a View over the Islands in the Bay of Naples. Affandi achieves a sense of the dramatically massive scale of Mount Merapi and the powerlessness of Man in the face of nature’s elemental forces by depicting the diminutive figures in the centre of the canvas as two indecipherable black blobs, contrasting them with the vastness of their surroundings.
Evoking an alienating landscape, Affandi reminds us of the enormous ability of nature to annihilate. However, Merapi Landscape is also a subtle reminder of the cycle of life and the restorative powers of destruction. Using a rich viridian hue to create the background for the dense foliage, Affandi went over it with lines of impasto to create his iconic tactile imagery, capturing the dynamism of the wind as it combs through the verdure. The artist includes the rich frondescence around Mount Merapi, a reminder that volcanic soil, known as andosols, provides for a mineral-rich soil that promotes the proliferation of vegetation around the area. In fact, hundreds of thousands of people live close to active volcanoes due to the fertile volcanic soil that surround it. As such, these natural features are – for a significant proportion of Indonesian people – part of a complex set of mystical beliefs, and there is a national reverence for them, which Affandi pays homage to in this work. Merapi Landscape is a not a romanticised, but a Romantic representation of the splendour of Indonesia’s landscape.