Lisa Siregar

Walter van Oel’s ‘Honoring Borobudur.’ (JG Photo/Lisa Siregar)

Reflecting on History With Abstract Art

A huge painting of a red koi fish welcomes visitors to O House Gallery on the ground floor of Plaza Indonesia. The painting, by Sun Xiao Xeng, is part of the gallery’s current exhibition, “Sharing in Different.”

Bonnie Lim, owner of O House Gallery, said the idea of the exhibition was to showcase an eclectic mix of work from the gallery’s collection.

“O House would like to present paintings from different artists with different styles,” she said.

About 10 paintings are exhibited in the small space at the mall, which was opened earlier this year to give a broader showing to art pieces than they would otherwise get at O House’s full-size gallery in Kebayoran Baru, South Jakarta.

Of the works currently making up this mini-exhibition, three were created by abstract painter Hanafi using unconventional media. The three paintings were all created on wood from the back of a desk and are grouped together in a corner.

All of the paintings were selected by the O House Lab, the gallery’s team of curators.

“[At O House] we class painters based on age and seniority, so if any of the paintings are sold, we need to replace them with other works that are equally good,” Bonnie said.

Two paintings by Lan Zheng Hui from his earlier exhibition, “Mighty Rain,” were sold, and the gallery replaced them with two paintings by the Dutch artist Walter van Oel.

Oel, 67, studied art at The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, Netherlands, and has been involved in many group and solo exhibitions since 1985.

He has lived around the world, spending time in the Netherlands, France, the United States and China, but has now joined the long line of foreign artists to settle in Bali.

In an earlier solo exhibition, also hosted by O House, Oel showed his style of using striking colors in blocks, capturing some of the world’s great icons in three-dimensions through a transparent color technique.

Oel’s “Marilyn Monroe Sukarno,” for example, catches the eye of anyone who passes by the small, glass-walled gallery. But at first it appears simply as a group of colors painted on a 5-by-2-meter canvas, a gradation of a bold red, turning into orange and finally becoming yellow at the other end of the canvas.

But if you walk slowly and pay attention to your changing point of view, you see Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, in his signature hat, side by side with Hollywood sex symbol Marilyn Monroe, with her trademark half-closed eyes and languorous smile.

The object and the background appear in one color. Sukarno is drawn on the bold red section, and Monroe on a small pink section to contrast with the yellow section of the painting.

Oel’s other work on display here, “Honoring Borobudur,” does not immediately make the famous temple obvious to viewers.

At first, you only notice golden plants and trees. But if you look at the painting from the right side, you will see two elephants with their heads together. From the left side, the same image looks like a standing figure of a woman in a prayer position, her hands on her chest. Viewing the painting from the center reveals, among the trees, countless small temples, a reflection of the grandeur of Borobudur.

Bonnie says Oel’s works escort viewers through the visual mathematics of space and optics.

“If we are standing in space, immobile, that doesn’t necessarily imply the absence of mobility,” she said. “Thought processes, at least, continue unabated.”

She also said that Oel, by capturing these objects and cultural icons in his work, is restating the role of art as a mirror of history.

“As a painter, it is his own way to remind people about history and the constant need to reflect on it,” she said.

Sharing in Different
Until January 6
O House Gallery
Plaza Indonesia, ground level
Jl. MH Thamrin, Central Jakarta
Tel. 0816 1042 9092

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