Traveling Light — Jumaadi

TRAV NG L T R A V E L L I NG

L I GHT

J UMA A D I

J UMA

ELL I I GHT AD I

cover; Bebukit Sunyi / 180 x 121 cm / acrylic on canvas / 2011 above; Memanah Mendung / 29.5 x 34.5 cm / gouache on paper / 2010 right; Menjelma Malam / 150 x 100 cm / acrylic on canvas / 2011

above; Cakrawala, Nyanyi Sunyi / 93 x 100.5 cm whole, 12.5 cm x 8 cm each / gouache on paper / 2010 right; Lubang Malam / 152 x 102 cm / acrylic on canvas / 2011

Opening Hours Monday to Saturday 10am – 6pm Closed on Sundays

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Brochure © 2011 TAKSU Malaysia Artworks and Images © 2011 Jumaadi

The Dance Of Eucalyptus / 12.5 x 18 cm (each) / gouache on paper, red string / 2009

17 Jalan Pawang 54000 Kuala Lumpur T +603 4251 4396 F +603 4251 4331 taksu@taksu.com www.taksu.com

Essay Gina Fairley Catalog concept & design jeff@studio25.my Printer Miracle Offset Print S/B

below; Sepasang Hujan / 49 x 42 cm / acrylic on board / 2011 above; One Night With Mark / 40 x 49 cm / acrylic on board / 2011

Cakrawala, Nyanyi Sunyi (detailed image) / 12.5 x 8 cm / gouache on paper / 2010

T R A V E L L I NG

L I GHT

J UMA A D I

Whispers from clouds and rain Gina Fairley Telling stories through pictures is as old as art itself. It is said the word narrative derives from the Hindi verb narrare, “to recount” and is related to the adjective gnarus, meaning “knowing” or “skilled”. It is a tradition as old as the Mahabharata and Ramayana, epic tales that lead us on our way. With the twentieth century, however, a chain of dialogues decreed narrative no longer relevant as a medium – no longer ‘modern’: the Dadaists, the abstractionists, minimalists, dematerialzation, conceptualism, and post-modernism had no place for narrative. Curiously, as these terms have gone out of circulation, narrative has become the navigational beacon for discerning today’s intercultural flows, as we search for renewed ‘meaning’ in the pace of contemporanteity. Neo-narrative, as it is called today, is more nuanced, ambiguous, and less dependent on our ‘reading’, rather articulating the hyphenated spaces and gaps in contemporary life through new media, performance, installation and, dare I say, has re-entered painting with a passion.

This duplicity of narrative is metaphor to our times. The traditional narrative structure of a beginning, middle and end is no longer tenable. It is a memory shared and abstracted.

In the same way, Jumaadi permits audiences to enter his personal world of story-telling bridging these ancient and contemporary definitions.

Growing up in a small village in Sidoarjo, East Java [Indonesia], it was a childhood of playing in the fields, of grass puppets and folklore interspersed with herding the family’s animals. Like vapors of memory this landscape floats across countless sheets of paper, tiled together in no formal order, somewhat musical, somewhat subconscious. It is not surprising to learn that Jumaadi grew up on the Mahabharata and Ramayana.

Time, therefore, is an abstracted lament in his work. As our lives are engulfed with the ever-increasing speed of things, Jumaadi’s images beg our time and, in return, they usher us into a world of profound contemplation.

In our conversations he explained, “…as much as I am moving, travelling, I really try hard to bring these works into absolute stillness.

I talk and pray and meditate through my paintings.” It is an innate spirituality that sits outside religion. There is sureness, a resolve, in his images almost mantra-like drawing on a complexity of emotions and thoughts that are distilled into very pure expressions, each page a visual Haiku.

Over the past decade Jumaadi has travelled extensively. These works are collected from three years of visual diaries from Java, Bali, Sydney, Adelaide, the remote Australian town of Hill End and, most recently, during his residency in Kuala Lumpur. With time destinations meld and the necessity to define ‘place’ becomes inconsequential. These images are the fusion of histories, heritage, gossip, tales, sentiments, and emotions that are downloaded before moving on.

While his movement across landscapes fuses as imagery, key motifs and text are their punctuation – constants that are repeated and refined. Spatially they connect the pages, strung together through the linear gesture of written text, or indeed as objects refuse to be confined within a single page.

Often Jumaadi uses the poems of TS Eliot, love letters, or the songs and lullaby’s sung as a child, the phonetic rhythm of the words in sync with the landscape. Translation has become abstracted.

“I like the sound of text. Often I quote fragments from books of poems that I carry with me, or from internet; sometimes they are my own poems or collaborations. Whether written in bahasa or English it’s not important anymore.” Jumaadi 2011

Another motif rain, washes this exhibition in torrents. As a symbol it speaks of nourishment for the earth, but also for sorrow, cleansing, renewal and forgiveness. Jumaadi says that he uses himself to measure other people’s condition or emotion, his paintings an extension to another. This layering of self and other, of place and non-place, of reality and sentiment is a little like the shifting characters of rain, from a light drizzle to torrential monsoon, to the precipitator of floods. It is both the landscape of Indonesia and Australia, weighty with light.

“I found those images slowly, one by one, and they found me too”, Jumaadi explains. “I am very comfortable to shift them around and float them as I want. They are my tools to formulate visual poems.” Artist and academic Michael Downs captured that sentiment superbly,“His tree was the tree, his cloud was the cloud; [but] not any tree or any cloud. And the whole composition was thus anchored in a poetic form where the visualized nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs held together as tightly as a sonnet.”2

Forgive Me Not to Miss You Not / 221 x 36 cm (whole) 18 x 12.5 cm (each) / gouache on paper / 2008-2009

In the same way Jumaadi’s landscapes, whether figurative or minimal, are punctuated with familiar motifs: a leaf, a cloud, rain, a tree, lovers, string, shorts and shirt.

Their non-linear manuscript are largely autobiographical and connect with oral histories and his cultural roots, and yet they act as a kind of compass across Jumaadi’s landscapes, easily translated to the viewer’s own realm of understanding. For example, while the leaf alludes to the mangroves of his hometown that is slowly sinking under mud1, it also points to broader environmental concerns. It is a sentiment extended to the delicate medium of gouache, his use of mulberry and handmade papers, and the decaled edges of the paper, hung floating on the wall, temporal and fragile. The physicality of the work mirrors its metaphorical frame.

Structure – while appearing loose and spontaneous – is deeply considered. It is a little like the Japanese calligraphic stroke the Ensõ, a circle executed in a single gesture after prolonged meditation and symbolising strength, enlightenment and elegance. All things come together in an abridged expression.

Considering these motifs, one ponders the small group of drawings with hands and heads severed. Posing the question to Jumaadi he replied, “Somehow its easier or lighter if we travel without our head. Maybe it’s about never perfecting and completing things. Maybe they are about being in pain… to create a tunnel for the world to enter through…a memory.”

It is the unexpected in Jumaadi’s work that enchants and ushers us to new ways of seeing the world we share.

As an adult he adds to that visuality of his childhood with the Australian landscape, his home since the ‘90s. In this exhibition the horizon is a very strong element that divides the picture plane. As one living in Australia, there is an ever-presence of an expansive emptiness, captured in Jumaadi’s cathartic repetition of earth and sky. In Asia it is rare to experience that sharpness of horizon, either obstructed by density, pollution or tropical vegetation and thus, landscape has been a genre neglected in contemporary Asian art. Jumaadi reminds us that ‘landscape has the ability to preserve our collective memory. It also locates us in our personal and spiritual relation to landscape.’

While the horizontal line acts as a meter, dancing across these works from left to right, the individual tiles that make up these sparse landscapes have a soft luminosity like the soft edge abstractions of Mark Rothko.

They eloquently articulate a ‘presence’; a humanity that we connect with, whether as colourful figurations or ethereal horizons, to his sensitivity material and spatial dialogues.

It is this duplicity of the image that liberates them from formulaic genres.

In Indonesia it is a multi-facetted experience, where an individual moves across several forms of creative expression from painting to installation, to performance, puppetry, poetry and music. For TAKSU Jumaadi welcomes us into that tradition – that mode of story-telling – and in that experience allows us to find a place for his narratives here in Malaysia.

1

In May 2006 mud started flowing in Jumaadi’s homelands of East Java where gas company PT Lapindo Brantas was drilling. Consuming villages, the mud continues to flow today.

2

Michael Downes, catalogue essay Legge Gallery, and supervisor of Jumaadi’s Master of Fine Art, National Art School, Sydney.

Comments by Jumaadi in email interview with writer January 2011

above Cerita II, a suite of 52 drawings pen & watercolour on paper 51.5 x 234 cm (whole) 12.5 x 17.5 cm (each) / 2009

below left Untitled (drawings) / 17 x 21 cm / pen on paper / 2007 below right Untitled (loose drawings) / 13.5 x 20 cm / pen on paper / 2007

EDUCATION

2008 Master of Fine Art National Art School, Sydney 2000 Bachelor 0f Fine Art National Art School, Sydney SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2011 Traveling Light Taksu Gallery,

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 2010 Rain Rain, Come Again Watters Gallery, Sydney 2009 Unsent Letter Legge Gallery, Sydney 2008 Home Sweet Home Art Space, Adelaide Festival Centre South Australia Letters and Stories Soma Gallery, Adelaide Home is not sweet home Gallery 4A, Sydney Museum of Memory

Project Space, National Art School, Sydney Jumaadi Next Generation Art Melbourne 08, Melbourne Story from Cloud, Sky and Rain Legge Gallery, Sydney 2007 Jumaadi World Created French Cultural Centre,

Surabaya, Indonesia 2006 Works on Paper Legge Gallery, Sydney 2005 WS Rendra 70th Birthday Hotel Kartika Wijaya,

Batu, East Java, Indonesia Jumaadi at Mura Clay Mura Clay Gallery, Sydney 2004 Be-Longing Mura Clay Gallery, Sydney 2003 Mapping Memory Bondi Beach Pavilion Gallery 2002 Dreams & Memories Hill on Hargrave Gallery, Sydney 1999 The Green Paintings French Cultural Centre,

Surabaya, Indonesia One Thousand Frangipanis Australian Volunteers

International, Sydney SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2010

2009

Museum of Memory Flinders University Pendopo, South Australia Istanbul 5 Student International Triennale Turkey Art Month Sydney Watters Gallery, Sydney 2010 National Art School Gallery, Sydney End of Year Show Watters Gallery, Sydney, NSW Common Sense National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta Outback Art Prize Broken Hill Regional Gallery, NSW Perang Kata Dan Rupa Gallery Salihara, Jakarta

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

Theatre Of Grass Blue Poles Gallery, Byabarra, NSW Work On Paper Legge Gallery, Sydney Without Boundaries: Artist Books Mundubbera Regional Art Gallery, NSW Without Boundaries: Artist Books Art Gallery of NSW Research Library Annual Members Exhibition Gallery 4A, Sydney Blake Art Prize National Art School Gallery, Australia Melbourne Art Fair Legge Gallery, Sydney Black And White Legge Gallery, Sydney Blake Art Prize Dilmar Gallery, Sydney Blake Art Prize NAS Gallery, Sydney Painted Bridges University Of Southern Queensland Gallery, Queensland Redlands Westpac Art Prize 2006 Mosman Regional Gallery, Sydney End Of Year Exhibition Legge Gallery, Sydney Jumaadi And Peta Hinton Legge Gallery, Sydney The Song Of Grass Garden Of Government House, Sydney Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition Nan Tien Temple Wollongong, NSW Mosman Art Prize Mosman Regional Gallery, Sydney Selected works Craft Victoria, Melbourne Installation of grass puppets and digital images at the Studio of the Sydney Opera House Mosman Art Prize, Mosman Regional Gallery, Sydney Art on the Rocks ASN Gallery, The Rocks, Sydney Mosman Art Prize Mosman Regional Gallery, Sydney Salon de Refuses SH Erwin Gallery, Sydney Mosman Art Prize Mosman Regional Gallery, Sydney

REVIEWS AND PUBLICATIONS

2009

2008

2007 2006 2005

2004 2003 2002

Place, Practice and Ten dialogues

by Yoanna Choi, North End Road, London, UK Through the Mud Profile, The Jakarta Post 15 October, by Indra Hersaputra The Jakarta Post, Profile 2 February, by Dewi Anggraini The Jakarta Post, People 13 February Asia Pacific Focus, ABC TV 10 September Object Magazine, Jumaadi’s Grass Puppets December Issue Sydney Morning Herald, Open Gallery

by Sunanda Creagh The Jakarta Post, feature article 8 August The Jakarta Post, feature article July Asia Pacific Focus, ABC Television 6 July Kompas (major Indonesian daily) Artist Profile 9 August