Lot 27: Di sini, kini dan dimana (Here, now and where)

PANDE KETUT TAMAN (b. Indonesia 1970)
Di sini, kini dan dimana (Here, now and where)
signed and dated 'Pande Ketut Taman/2005' (lower right)
acrylic on canvas
59 x 98 1/2 in. (150 x 250 cm.)

Jogjakarta, Indonesia, Biennale Jogja VIII 2005 "Di Sini Dan Kini" (Consciousness of the Here and Now) , 4-22 December 2005, exhibition catalogue, p. 104-105.

Jakarta, Indonesia, Common Grounds - A Glimpse of Indonesian Contemporary Art , Galeri Nasional Indonesia, 13-19 April 2007.

Here, now and where is truly a work that celebrates the most ordinary. Pande believes in the transforming beauty of pigment suspended in oil on canvas and the ability of the beauty to suggest transcendence. Even though he paints ignoble subjects, he does so in ennobling format suggesting that even they deserve to be elevated as art. As he paints the shallow, the vulgar and the headless as if they were profound, elegant and meditative, he reminds us obliquely that even in the ostensible absence of these qualities there is the enduring possibility of their resonance.

The sheer size of the work helps in the magnifying of the importance and elegance of the work. As one approaches the composition, one wonders for a split second, the identity of the subjects. At a glance, the work strikes the viewer with its roundness of objects and with a definite sense of rhythm. It is only with closer examination that one realises that the artist has depicted the wheels of the bicycles and using the canvas almost like a camera which zooms in on the subject and takes a close-shot.