`Just Bunga': Revealing enduring themes

Carla Bianpoen ,  Contributor ,  Jakarta   |  Thu, 02/19/2009 2:13 PM  |  Lifestyle

Today, Feb. 19, artist Bunga Jeruk Permata Pekerti unfolds her latest works - 16 paintings, three objects, a light box and a neon sign - in a solo exhibition at Edwin's Gallery in Jakarta.

Usually called Bunga or Bejay (from Bunga Jeruk), she has been active as an artist ever since her first one-woman show in her hometown Solo, Central Java.

Since then she has participated in many joint exhibitions, locally and abroad, keeping quite a distance between solo exhibitions. This is her sixth solo exhibition coming after spending some time concentrating on the bearing and rearing of her son Akira.

Her fans will remember the images of cute little kids filling her canvases of beautiful landscapes, appearing as if Bunga envisaged a Garden of Eden, a modern utopia.

The endearing figures on her colorful canvases were seemingly telling of a celestial, even surreal atmosphere, yet they were inspired by sentiments born from challenging personal circumstances.

And underneath the beautiful landscape, appearing as a delightful scenery in the tradition of Mooi Indie paintings, lay the naked truth of personal experiences and dramatic happenings in the country, and the illusion of a paradisiacal land transformed into gripping sceneries that make you shudder.

One of the select female artists featured in Indonesian Women Artists: The Curtain Opens, authored by Carla Bianpoen, Farah Wardani and Wulan Dirgantoro and published by the Indonesian Art Foundation in 2007, her works were described as depictions of a "Woman-Child realm of fantasies, psyche and iconography, with a style blending dark humor, kitsch and sometimes satire with vivid, radiant colors suggesting an almost saccharine sweetness. Here, the blend of girlish childhood fantasies and everyday lives are dipped in acid."

In her sixth solo exhibition, which is her second held at Edwin's Gallery here, the tone has changed slightly, with works that tend to be more in the realist mode. But while they have lost some of the gripping sense of drama that used to fill most of her previous oeuvre, her love of children and animals has remained an enduring theme and is tangible, although her children figures are now more grown up and a variety of animals are featured, including bears, a whale, an elephant and fish, rather than just the cats and dogs of earlier works.

Interested in the world around her and in the issues that concern the world, Bunga is informed about serious dangers such as climate change and the near-extinction of the polar bear; she expresses her own concerns through paintings in which the animal is always featured with a child, as if to emphasize the bond between human beings and the animal world.

One such work is Selamat Jalan, Sayang (So Long, Darling) featuring a sculpture of a little girl embracing the bear, or Lonely Bear, a painting showing a bear in the midst of a snow field with a little girl; but there is also a whale heading toward a little fish, titled Where are you going? Such grave concerns are painted in beguiling light colors, and revealing their depth of meaning only at a second glance.

Now the mother of a little boy, Bunga's work also features the "hardships" of little children when they have to finish their meal or do their homework

But it is the paintings inspired by Michael Sowa that are the most interesting. Michael Sowa is a German painter known for his surreal and stunning paintings emanating an atmosphere of somber solitary feeling. Bunga's affinity with the works of this German artist seems to match her own moods at times, as expressed in the painting The Three Little Pigs, in which the three eponymous animals, painted in very light color, are set in playful movement against a stirring dark-green background.

The background of green evokes a sense of mystery, of "hidden" comments, that also underlies her painting Runaway Baby, which features a realistic child figure set against a mass of clouds floating in the air and some green at the side as background. But Bunga does not stop with just mysteriousness for the green; rather she develops her use of the color to become a sports field for Teen Spirit.

Besides paintings and 3D objects, the exhibition also includes a light box containing an elephant and a pig as well as an image of a recurring figure from her canvases, which is titled Toko Serba Ada (One Stop Shop), a title that may well suit this exhibition of allegorical works that chronicles the artist's thoughts and visions in semi-realist and semi-na*ve mode.

Just Bunga
A solo exhibition of Bunga Jeruk
Feb. 20 -March 7
Edwin's Gallery
Jl. Kemang Raya 21
Kemang, South Jakarta

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