Davy between painting, photography

Alex Supartono ,  Contributor ,  Jakarta   |  Sun, 06/15/2008 10:17 AM  |  Arts & Design

In his letter to Alfred Steiglitz -- the father of American photography -- Marcel Duchamp wrote: "You know exactly how I feel about photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable."

The letter is dated May 22, 1922.

Duchamp's strong inclination and enthusiasm toward photography didn't then immediately win photography a secure position as a medium for esthetic expression.

It really took decades; the Museum of Modern Art New York, for instance, only started collecting photographs in the 1930s, almost a century after the invention of the camera.

The reason for that might be because photography itself had taken another twist in its history course. In the wake of the invention of the printing machine, the world saw a boom in print media in the early 20th Century, giving plenty of opportunities for professional photographers to place their works in newspapers and magazines, rather than in museums and galleries.

Photographs collected by museums were typically "iconic", made famous by prior publications in books, magazines or newspapers. They were documentary and journalistic photos, not those intentionally made as art.

The "something else" Duchamp had envisioned years before only became a reality when art vanguards in the 1960s began to focus on non-documentary style photography. That was when the concept of photography was translated as not only a means for capturing reality but also as a way to create its own reality; when photographers began to make photographs solely for the purpose of art. Hence, the art market began to play its role.

I was filled with those ideas when I poured over Davy Linggar's "Sketch, Photo and Image" exhibition at the Ark Gallery. Knowing Davy as a fashion photographer and a trained painter, I tried to sense Davy's existence in his big paintings, several sketches, testimonies written on the wall, installations and hundreds of Polaroids, within the context of photography, art and the current art boom in Indonesia.

Speaking of the exhibition venue, Ark Gallery, which sits at Jakarta's busiest upmarket district of Kebayoran Baru, has earned a reputation as the city's most popular contemporary art display room.

The gallery has new exhibitions almost every month, publishes books and catalogs, and has a fantastic selling record.

Jason, one of Ark's three owners told me once: "These days, if you organize an exhibition and it doesn't sell, there must be something wrong with you".

The art market, so to speak, is the "something else" that makes photography unbearable for the art scene. But for Davy, he needs to take another step to combine his practiced photography and his painting background. He needs to transform his "photographs" into paintings.

Among his friends at the Bandung Institute of Technology's Fine Arts and Design School, Davy is known as a good realist painter. Empirically, I know good photographers are usually (but not necessarily) good sketchers. In fact, many legendary photographers started out their studies and careers as painters, including Henry Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray and William Klein.

Looking at Davy's massive paintings (100 x 150 cm), one easily feels Davy's photographic eye in the most extensive way.

It shows in the way Davy frames and cuts his figures, his choice of angle and composition, not to mention the subject matter, drawn from the fashion world, in which he also abides.

Despite playing with color, lighting, dripping paint and the disproportioned objects, his paintings do not seem a far cry from his photographic references.

One might guess Davy paints (based on) his photos, or he makes (instead of takes) photos manually on canvas. Actually it doesn't matter how he works, because Davy is not toying with the two notions of capturing and creating reality in photography.

He simply translates his photographic eye through his skill in painting on to canvas.

Another important part of this exhibition that attracted me most was the Polaroid section.

Hundreds of Polaroids are scrupulously framed, rightly mounted on the wall and grouped by theme in to frames of three, four or six photos. They show Davy's everyday experiences from which we can deduce the way in which he looks at things.

They are mostly about body and city, the two basic aspects of fashion. They are basic because the body is unclothed and the city is geometric. It is as if the people and the city are not yet fashioned.

Some of them tell about his dog, personal belongings and private activities. They are remarkably intimate and show strongly Davy's personal sensibility.

The blurred, unclear and intentionally unfocused objects don't serve Davy's painting impulse. They are rather spontaneous moments that are still worth recording.

One may notice that some of the Polaroids have been transformed into painting. But this transformation, I would say, has omitted their intimacy which could only be produced through the instantaneousness of Polaroid.

It is a testimony to this exhibition that we are able to see the creative process that is a tension (and compromise) between photography and painting not just in terms of Indonesia's art scene, but within the broader context of a photographer/painter.

The writer is a lecturer at the Photography Department of the Jakarta Institute of the Arts

"Sketch, Photo, Image" by Davy Linggar,
June 7-21
Ark Gallery, Jl. Senopati Raya, South Jakarta
www.arkgallerie.com

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