Art Review | Maryanto’s Sense of Dread

 

The selection of Maryanto’s recent works – consisting of ten drawings and a seven-minute single-channel video of clips from the Indonesian artist’s ascent to the peaks of two sacred stratovolcanoes – on show at Tabula Rasa’s single-room space are arranged to encourage navigating the room clockwise. The exhibition starts with two monumental stretched canvases, titled Iereng Gede biosphere (The Biosphere of Mount Gede, 2023) and Iereng Pangrango biosphere (The Biosphere of Mount Pangrango, 2023) – each representing one of the sacred peaks. In both, the artist has covered the canvas in black acrylic paint then scratched away at its surface to create detailed scenes of West Javanese forest floors. Their scale envelops the viewer, immersing them in an environment of moss-covered branches, fallen trunks and a plethora of plants that seem undisturbed by human intervention, imparting a sense of quiet serenity. Maryanto’s techniques in creating such works seem also to reflect a moral position on the landscapes he depicts. In these two works his process is ‘negative’, in the sense that he is scraping away paint, which might in turn be read as reflecting the fact that a lack of human intervention is what makes these scenes beautiful. In the remaining works he uses the ‘positive’ technique of applying charcoal to paper and canvas to illustrate what might be described as the negative effect of humanity’s interventions in nature.