Written in the Sky

Honold Fine Art is pleased to present Written in the Sky, the third pop up show of HFA in Ubud, Bali from 24 November–24 December 2017.

The exhibition brings together artworks of nine artists: Jumaldi Alfi, Marco Cassani, Heri Dono, Fendry Ekel, Louise Manifold, Ivan Sagita, Filippo Sciascia, Sally Smart and Narcisse Tordoir.

According to its modus operandi, Honold Fine Art chooses a new context where to locate the show: another gallery. During the period of the exhibition the artworks are displayed inside the beautiful new wing of Tonyraka Art Gallery, one of the most established commercial art galleries in Bali.

The exhibition Written in the Sky is about drawing as a way of thinking in a broad and metaphysical sense. If disegno is about the ability to make the drawing as well as the intellectual capacity to invent the design, WITS is essentially about reading; about the nature of the mind.

OPEN: November 23, 2017 at 7 pm
Tonyraka Art Gallery, backwing
Jl. Raya Mas No. 86, Mas, Ubud, Bali – Indonesia
+62 812-3600-8035

Opening hours:
Monday – Sunday from 10 am to 5 pm

info@honoldfineart.com
www.honoldfineart.com

Jumaldi Alfi is painting mostly in acrylic on large canvases and always unfolds his respective subject matter in series. The smaller painting in the show is from Myth Sisyphus, Nightwalker (2014); a series in which a figure shown from behind metaphorically stands for the persona of the artist, his creative struggle, the burden of consciousness and his outsider role within society. The second, larger painting also shows the figure of a man and derives from the recent series of Melting Memories – Collage Paintings (2015-2017). Image elements from Jumaldi Alfi’s well known ’arsenal’ of visual signs can be observed in both paintings; a personal iconography invoking attention and admiration in a powerfully irresistible way. Whether it be empirical objects from the natural world, phrases of written text or other visual quotations, the references all seem to come from the past. They reflect the transformation of existential and spiritual experiences either from the artist’s individual imagination or from a shared collective visual memory, handed down to us mainly by art history.

Marco Cassani’s work reflects on our economic system; in particular on the precarious state of inter human agreement, and the subtle distinction between trading and economy, (i.e. creating value) being the very core of cultural production. Watt is the international unit for power mainly associated with electricity, which in the modern world is the source of light. The interconnected presence of these two elements, light and power, intrigues Marco Cassani to infuse the element of light as representation of power into his new sculpture series The Alphabet of Money (Huruf Uang). It is inspired by the language, which has been created by a ‘madman of the village’, the outcast of the Balinese village where Cassani works and lives at this moment. To give value to the banknotes that this villager creates and uses as his own fantasized economical system, the Alphabet of Money consists of a series of ghostly sculptures made from wood, Perspex and neon light. With the series Cassani aims to create a parallel understanding toward the value of currency. The language-code system is part of the tactics to counter the structure of dominant power and human particularities that the artist has highlighted and collected in the form of new products, found objects, ready-mades and assisted readymades as his artistic creation since 2014. For Written in the Sky, Cassani will be showing a selection of floor sculptures from the Alphabet of Money and the facsimile edition of his work Banknotes (2016). Twenty hand-drawn banknotes from the ‘madman’, with whom Cassani over the past few years has built an intriguing relationship of creative exchange, are reproduced recto and verso and exhibited as a backdrop of the Alphabet of Money.

Heri Dono is arguably Indonesia’s internationally most accomplished artist. His multifaceted oeuvre is deeply grounded in the tradition of wayang kulit shadow puppet theatre, a medium, which the artist approaches in a conceptual and subversive way from the firm and confident perspective of his contemporary artistic practice. Especially for the exhibition Written in the Sky the artist includes the kinetic installation Pinocchio Acrobat and an accompanying drawing.

Fendry Ekel has been dubbed a pictor doctus, whose ethos is to investigate through painting the pictures he deals with in order to come close to their essence. Ekel’s subject matter revolves around the relation between ‘man and memory’. Due to rapid technological development of the lighting industry (such as light emitting diode or LED), Neon light nowadays seems to have become an icon of something from the past with a certain nondescript melancholic atmosphere. To Fendry Ekel this condition makes this an interesting object to depict as image in his work. Fendry Ekel’s interest for light is not limited to its aesthetic and function to make things visible but more importantly includes its metaphors. In Ekel’s work light as text appears for the first time in the painting series Century 21 from 2006. The subject of light has since evolved continuously in his Title and Year Painting series, where he painted neon lights in the form of numbers and text from the titles of his own paintings. In the exhibition Written in The Sky Ekel presents Das Wort, the first work of a new series of metal gates.

Louise Manifold in an Irish visual artist who works conceptually with film, photography, drawing, sculpture and text. Fascinated by the power of stories and the creation of myth, her multi disciplinary practice explores our perception of self and the body in relation to the other. Much of her work relates to the sensory qualities of language. Interested in exploring spaces of in between and uncertainty, many of her works dissect found narratives, in which interior thought becomes externalized. One of the distinctive elements in her practice is her engagement with outmoded ideas and objects that she considers to hold a potential to reactivate the past in the present. In WITS she presents a work she developed earlier this year in her temporary studio in Berlin, Germany. On a series of 31 found bw and colour photographic postcards from the ‘Brocken’, a mountain and touristic destination in Germany during the 1920s and ‘30s, she developed a series of small surreal collages, which together form the monumental work Starless at Brocken.

Ivan Sagita is a painter living and working in Yogyakarta. His painterly and sculptural practice is seriously drawing based. For this show he includes groups of drawings from two different series, which lie a decade apart. Death and the transience of human existence is a persistent theme in his artworks. The work confronts us with a vision and attitude towards death that is grounded on the foundations of philosophy and experience of life in Java. His drawings reflect a complex relation between the body, its soul and time. The work is characterized by a certain atmosphere of solitude and melancholy.

Filippo Sciascia, best known for his ongoing painting series Lux Lumina, is showing two monumental works from his recent painterly exploration of natural and cosmic phenomena. In both works a carefully constructed image carrier is accommodating a smaller painting, thus synthesizing an almost readymade material element with painting in such an evident and natural way, that it shows the artists wealth of experience not only with objects and sculpture, but as well with the aesthetic consciousness and material tradition of Arte Povera. The monumental paintings combine abstraction and figuration in a way, which ingeniously and discretely renders our preoccupation with the former polemic distinction completely irrelevant.

Sally Smart is a renowned artist from Australia, who since 2014 also maintains a studio practice in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Invited by OFCA International and parallel to her presentation Story of the Dragon in collaboration with Heri Dono, in her recent solo exhibition The Choreography of Cutting at Sarang Building in Yogyakarta, Smart presented a ‘serial exploration of an alternative history to the Western perspective, by positioning early 20^th century avant-garde ballet forms alongside traditional Indonesian shadow puppet performance’. Before a complex curtain backdrop, composed of colourful modernist abstractions alongside beautifully crafted digital embroideries and photographic image quotations, a splendid theatre of suspended puppets and form elements was turning and whirling softly in the breeze. HFA now presents a selection of seven puppets from The Choreography of Cutting which has been compiled by the artist especially for the exhibition Written in the Sky.

Narcisse Tordoir is showing two monumental paper collages from the work cycle Unos A Otros (2009). Both works are self portraits from a project that was beginning with a research period, resulting in a setting for a shoot, developed in collaboration with other creative talent and photographer Ronald Stoops. Tordoir’s works are stories full of bravado, simultaneously subtle and in the face, weaving romance with harsh reality, history with contemporaneity, moving pictures with static ones, and madness with seriousness. Tordoir practices painting as an act; a performance that continues to resonate. His language is associative, intrusive and mysterious yet with great formal precision. The elements, recognizable in themselves, are combined in a way which creates tension and opens up a semantic field of emotion, disrupting our ordinary ways of seeing and consistently off-footing the viewer.