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Cross Translation - 11 June 2010
By A. Rikrik Kusmara
As we observe Agung Fitriana’s paintings so far, we would see that as a whole there are two main things that he employs in his paintings: visual elements forming graphic images, and the text. The two are then configured into the paintings and form a unity there. In general, we can call the graphic elements non-representative forms; they are not recognizable shapes, and neither do they trigger our memory of a certain image. We commonly call them “abstract forms”. These abstract shapes then merge with a configuration of texts—as our brain processes the texts—and force us to give meanings to them. As our brain and mind wish to understand the texts, Agung’s paintings seem to compel us to seek the relationship between the graphic elements and the texts.
Such is thus the general tendency of Agung Fitriana’s paintings. Critically, he succeeds in presenting the “tension” or the “tug of war” between the viewer’s visual perception about the traces of impulses coming from reality—which we have daily recognized (and become our memories)—and the representations that tend to be abstract and seek to reproduce new illusions of reality. The two aesthetic potentials are depicted through an effective and essential elaboration of painting techniques, so that we are invariably present in a situation between the clarity and the uncertainty of forms and meanings. Agung Fitriana’s paintings, therefore, are invariably enigmatic in nature.
The works that are present in Agung’s solo exhibition today are forms of evolutions of his early works, which often depict abstract representations using colors and lines with a minimalist tendency, as evident in the painting titled Abstroke#1. The basis of his idea is the history of aesthetics within the context of modern paintings, in which the abstract discourse as one of the grand symptoms of modern art has met the new logic of contemporary art. This new logic is found in the visual phenomenon influenced by symptoms of new realism, or the influence of the digital technology revolution, as in digital imaging in photography and computer images, which has brought forth many questions from among the artists (painters) about reality, as we are all inundated by computer-generated and computer-enhanced images. Such a situation is considered as a symptom of the visual culture; a culture in which the images serve as the mechanism of language and an inevitable way of communicating.
In Agung’s initial works, we see much of abstractions in the minimalistic lines and colors, combined with symptoms of digital images that enable the combination and expansion of paintings as the convention that is analogous with the new approaches that use the logic of effects as we see in photography and digital images. The result is—and this is one strong feature of Agung’s subsequent aesthetic approaches in his later works—the illusive tendency of realism, or Agung’s tendency to represent abstract paintings that create an impression of depth on the flatness of the canvas plane.
Agung’s second phase of painting development begins with the series of An Other Word-Lines_1 and Misspelling#II, which show his strong tendency in capturing the phenomenon of illusive presence as represented by images and texts as visual phenomenon. To Agung, the two aspects serve as a combination of questions about the meaning of reality as we see today. The reality that we see and reaches our brain as images and/or texts has served as the basic question in the philosophy of being, or one that in philosophy is recognized as ontology. Through the representation of images that we see on the whiteboard, Agung presents the issue of the essence of physical reality and the illusions that our brain is processing. The painting entity that describes the phenomenon of traces of images on the whiteboard plane signifies the conceptual questions that Agung is proposing: Where is reality situated? On the physical reality of the whiteboard, or on our consciousness? One further question is about the status of traces of reality once they become paintings.
Agung’s ontological questions about reality serve as a bridge to his works in the subsequent phase, as evident in the works Point of View - Reduction of Actual Content, Point of View - The Principles of Visual Reality, Point of View - the Principles of Visual Reality # 2, and What We Look for #I. Agung develops the complexity of reality between images and text, which he finds in many forms of reality, especially in the texts of art books that for him are traces that will lead us to understanding of art. Through graphic depictions of images in the art texts, combined with the depiction of new texts that Agung has subjectively comprehended, we have before us visual perceptions that exist between clear and blurred images, in which we have perspective depth that creates an impression of spatial depth. His paintings thus affirm the depiction of illusive reality. It is this phase that I consider as the approach of cross translation in Agung’s concept of paintings. It is an approach that Agung has taken to re-view the relationship between the reality of images and the reality of texts, as well as the impact of ambience that result from the relationship between the meanings of forms and aesthetic arrangements as a whole.
It is such ambience in Agung’s paintings that further serves as a kind of phenomenological approach: the idea about how to define or objectify things (in this case, images in paintings), based on a subjective (artistic) approach as a part of the effort to identify reality through conscious experiences, which according to the philosopher Edmund Husserl are much affected by intentions or personal experiences, where intentions itself exist within ourselves, covered by perceptions, memories, and ways of signification. Due to such (varying) intentions, the signification of a certain phenomenon does not constitute a monolithic certainty.
In Agung’s case, this explains the situation as Husserl suggested, that what we see from reality and what we define about reality are influenced by the biases of significations and depend on our experiences. The cross translation in Agung’s paintings serves as an effort to present the ambience of experience in viewing the relationship between the natural reality and the illusive reality; or how far the intention of our subjectivity is able to affirm or identify one entity of meaning in the same painting object.
The above almost reminds us of the conceptual phenomenon of the minimalism works in the sixties: “Minimalism puts emphasis on the material objects (a cube, a square, a triangular prism, a prop, a column, a serial arrangement of volumes) of aesthetic contemplation as they appear to us in our experience of them as well as on the meanings they acquire in our experience” (2). In this case, however, Agung’s works are not similar to the minimalism of three dimensional objects or sculptures that also create an experience of physical depth in real ways. The similarity in the concepts behind Agung’s paintings and minimalism is more in the illusive experience of pictorial reality.
The emphasis on the cross translation concept in the aesthetic corridor of illusory ambiance then serves as the basis of Agung’s approach in his last works, What We See Depend Mainly Upon What We Look For II, I’ll Walk Where My Own Nature Would Be leading, and Ultimate Sophistication. In these works, Agung is more keenly aware about the approach that he takes for his works. The images in his works become increasingly complex, and expands the phenomenon of experience in the cross translation of images and texts and the rising phenomenon that we see in his works, in the form of the layered reality as evident in the work The Real Essence of Work is Concentrated of Mind. This shows how Agung, as a contemporary painter, has moved beyond the problem of combining the subject matters, concepts, and aesthetic approaches in his paintings. Agung has succeeded in inserting his painting approach in a narrowing niche and in our understanding about the increasing complex role of the artists in the development of the art world on the national and international levels. It is this complexity that I am sure Agung is keenly aware of and he presents in his latest work as the Ultimate Sophistication.
Reference:
1.FIFTY KEYCONTEMPORARY THINKERS From Structuralism To Post-Humanism, Second Edition John Lechte Routledge, New York, 2008
2. A COMPANION TO CONTEMPORARY ART SINCE 1945 A COMPANION TO CONTEMPORARY ART SINCE 1945, Edited by Amelia Jones Blackwell Publishing 2006
