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Fleeting images
Old age usually brings maturity, wisdom and an aversion to adventure
Old age usually brings maturity, wisdom and an aversion to adventure.
Legong dedari
In the case of senior photographer Rio Helmi, the last part is definitely not true. Turning 56 this year did not prevent him from embarking on a new adventure, experimenting with brushes and paints instead of apertures and lenses.
The results of that experiment can be seen at an ongoing exhibition, “Transitory”, at the Komaneka Gallery in Ubud. Around 50 images, some printed photographs and others printed photos painted with oils, display Helmi’s various talents and aspirations, as he is a photographer, author, filmmaker and, now, painter.
The show also underlines an important shift in Helmi’s aesthetic as a visual artist. Helmi called “Transitory” a retrospective of his personal work on Balinese spiritual and ritual culture over the last 30 years.
“But it is also a new direction for me to be working with mixed media. In my personal photographic documentation of Bali, I have tried to capture the fleeting, the moments of revelation and manifestation, or perhaps the simply fleeting. Now, as I paint and gild these familiar images which have become an indelible part of me, I begin to see them in new ways – and I realize that these images in my mind, which I have considered to be indelible in my memory, are transient as well,” he said.
Decades of immersion in Balinese life have enabled Helmi to see that the culture is not static, a realization that eventually brought him to the transient nature of the images he has taken of the island and its people.
“Now, even the way I see my photographs changes, hence the way I present them changes as well. In this exhibition I have included some images I have painted over by hand, perhaps adding to the transient nature of the image itself,” he said.
Helmi said he had always wanted to be a painter but lacked the confidence to go down that path.
“I don’t really understand painting,” he confessed.
But, two months ago he caved in to the urge and took up brushes and palette. He selected some of his old photographs and began working on them, likening his creative process to vandalism.
“Sometimes you get disaster. It is between disaster and transformation. I feel like a three-year-old playing with my food,” he recalled of his initial exuberance at “vandalizing” his photos.
“Photography is all about perfection, while this looks like a filthy rag,” he said as he tried to rub an unwanted blot of yellowish paint from an unfinished painting.
He doesn’t follow any school of aesthetic or style and lets the photographs dictate the kind of colors and strokes he will employ. Although he nearly always starts with a basic idea of what he would like to do, inevitably the photographs demand that he abandon any rigid plan and improvise.
“And a whole new perspective comes to light. Somehow it is fitting: like all living cultures, Balinese culture is transient. Like all living cultures, Balinese culture is full of the unpredictable,” he said of the process.
In several instances, he only painted a small section of the photograph, leaving the remaining image in black and white. His work Garuda, depicting a legong dancer performing the mythical bird repertoire, is a fine example of this approach. Helmi meticulously painted the dancer, who occupies a tiny space on the upper part of the image, consciously selecting the dancer as the primary focus of attention.
The whole process of recreation not only infused the photographs with a new brilliance but also endowed Helmi with a new sense of liberation.
“I can do something else and it gives me a lot of freedom and I am fascinated with the changes when we put different materials on the photographs,” he said.
Helmi said he still cannot quite figure out the reason behind his leap of faith into painting, neither can he foresee the future consequences of this escapade.
“Maybe it’s a midlife crisis, maybe photographic images have became cheap, maybe I need to break a little out of something, or maybe I am just greedy, wanting to master both things, photography and painting, “
Transitory
An exhibition of printed and painted images by Rio Helmi
July 1 - August 1, 2011
Komaneka Gallery
Jl. Monkey Forest, Ubud
Phone: 0361-976090
