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span class="caption" style="width: 398px;">Between My Mother and My Father There’s Me (200 x 400 cm, three panels. Courtesy of Khadir SupartiniArtworks can come not only from reflections on life but also the story of the artists’ actual life.

This is true for young visual artist Ahmad Khadir Supartini in his first solo exhibition, “The Imitation Journey”, at Tujuh Bintang Art Space in Yogyakarta, which ran from April 11 to 15.

Seventeen expressionist paintings on big canvases and two three-dimensional works are all about the artist’s deep feelings of longing and profound desire to meet his father, who left him when he was only a baby.

It is true that he has no idea what his father looked like since he has no memory of him. “It is hard to make a picture of him since I have only heard stories about my father from people in the neighborhood. I was told he’s tall and he is an Arab who came from the city of Medina,” Khadir says.

When he was eight, his mother left him with his grandmother, who lived in the same neighborhood, and married a local man. Yet his relationship with his mother has been so close that he is proud to have his mother’s name, Supartini, as his family name.

Khadir’s mixed-media piece Between My Mother and My Father There’s Me (200 x 400 cm, three panels) bears a number of valuable and significant objects to construct his perception and imagination of his parents, as if he wanted to put his loved ones into a form of monument.

Khadir collaged a Middle-Eastern outfit known as a gamis belonging to his father, incorporated with a pair of large sandals underneath the left panel and a white striped gamis belonging to his mother, a priceless gift from his father, on the right panel. The smaller middle panel was left empty and painted dark.

Curator Rusnoto Susanto admitted there was an explosive burst of the soul when Khadir explored his father’s outfit and expressed a wish for it to be his actual father’s figure. He also hoped for a new life that placed him between the romantic relationship of his father and his mother. Mixed feelings seemed deeply buried and suppressed, but his heart apparently resisted.

He also painted figures of a man and a woman on two sides of a piece of a wooden door of his house, which was temporarily at the gallery, in Slipping In and Out of Dream’s (wood, 220 x 140 cm).

Khadir’s deep longing for his father brought him to work in Qatar for seven months in 2004 in the hope of a chance to meet him in Medina. He eventually changed his mind after he learned that his mother disagreed with the plan and became seriously ill.

That feeling of emptiness is unbearable for him and he is still haunted by his dreams of his father’s face, although he acknowledged that he can understand the reason why his mother did not want him to meet his father.

Imaginary Heads (oil on canvas, 140 x 180 cm, two panels) is a painting in which Khadir imagined what his father would look like: a long nose, thick moustache and long beard.

His mixed feelings toward his father result in two opposite attitudes to this very important man in his life, reflected in the dark, gloomy colors in most of his paintings.

It seems his feelings also caused his love and hate for his father to collide, indicated in I Love My Father’s Head (acrylic on canvas, 200 x 150 cm), which had a vague red-colored figure carrying a head. Me and Father (acrylic on canvas, 140 x 540 cm, three panels) clearly shows these two opposite attitudes expressed in bright red and blue.

An installation, Postrait, (fiberglass, iron) also tells of his obsessive feelings toward his father. In this work, he placed a head into each of five male toilets arranged in a row.

Other paintings are about his memories of life in Middle Eastern countries in Mirage (acrylic on canvas, 200 x 200 cm), Summertime (acrylic on canvas, 140 x 200 cm) and I Have So Much Bubblegum (acrylic on canvas, 150 x 200 cm).

“The Imitation Journey” is the result of Khadir’s meditation on his own life and family and the formative effect its troubles have had on him, personally and creatively. Through these works, he strives to render those troubles honestly and without pretense.