TEMPEST
OPENING: 13.12.22 19:00
By appointment 14. - 18.12.2022
Curator: Markéta Adamcová
CITY SURFER OFFICE PRAGUE
Bořivojova 1577, 130 00 Praha 3-Žižkov
If we think about the scale of paintings in the context of history written by men, asking if we should come to terms with it or confront it keeps us in a circle that leads nowhere by sheer definition (Kim Gordon mentions a similar circle in the musical context with regard to Madonna’s media sexuality). Therefore, I suggest to leave men out of this dialogue once and for all and ponder why paint large canvases today in the context of the subject depicted. From a viewer’s perspective, this is what resounds in my head. Let us think about cathedrals built so big as to make visitors feel small (face to face with the church rather than with God); later on, everyone was supposed to feel small faced with masculinity and, in another part of the world, with the massive buildings that represented the (lacking) magnificence of the Soviet Union: what do we want to make viewers perceive their human limits?
In the case of Ishmat Habib’s paintings, a large canvas offers the requisite background for the floating figures of spiritual beings engulfed by a space that does not impose its unequivocal imageability or abstraction – if we really focus for a moment and discern a volcano or any hint of jungle, the similarity will instantly meld into shapeless streams that permeate each other. The sizable range – the bared area of gestures and remarkable convolutes evoking force fields that both shroud and unveil the tiny figures inhabiting the areas – has a chance to represent our smallness in the face of the forces of nature as well as the world that we know nothing of despite the ubiquitous “We”.
Working with the stories of the Java philosophy, which is the way Habib has grown up and lives, the author touches on his origins but, in his own work, he is not interested in reflecting on the colonial background of Indonesia: he only touches this indirectly, with inner irony he likes to call Colonial Romanticism – overly romantic and mostly shallow notions of the charms of landscape with no insight into it. In his paintings, however, he works with the memory of place and oral history of his tribe, Java, passed from one generation to the next without material media such as books, drawing inspiration from the driving forces and beings that inhabit the landscape and the unwritten rules that maintain the balance between the original world and the human one. Being aware that these relationships and knowledge are disappearing rapidly, replaced by investment projects and a new ideology, he tries to allegorize this and relies on intuitive narration. Here, the intuition reflects a lot: how natural it feels for him to live the Java philosophy, how much he has been fascinated with the indescribable mystique (in any place), and the fact that he is not trying to justify or rationalize everything. With his paintings, we can consider if, by eradicating the original biomes, we may be getting rid of all physical organisms as well as any spiritual ones – this specific type of the memory of place.
The goal of showing Ishmat Habib’s work in our environment is not to present Javanese philosophy as something unique. Rather than that, it is meant to make us ask the question of whether we are indeed capable of turning to our own spiritual roots – his works prompt us to discover our local mysteries that may have disappeared long ago along with paganism – or may be still hidden somewhere deep within us.
Ishmat Habib studied art in Yogyakarta, Indonesia until early 2021, in the same year he came to Prague for a study exchange with Vladimír Skrepl at the Academy of Fine Arts. Currently he studies at prof. Willem de Rooij at Frankfurt’s Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule.