The Art Outside the Box

Unusual artistic exploration from France.

Teks Darma Ismayanto

There are many ways to make a drawing. So then the media to make a drawing is no longer of any importance. An idea that lies behind a drawing is what actually really important. You can ask someone to make a very beautiful realistic paintings, but what’s inside your head, no one can take that away from you,” said curator Michle Nurindsany. Arti Magazine met Nurindsany in the midst of the preparation for the exhibition Ligne a Ligne (Line to Line).

Ligne a Ligne is the main theme of the French art exhibition held for about two weeks in the National Gallery of Indonesia as part of the annual Printemps Francais (French Spring) Festival. This is the fifth year of such an exhibition held in Jakarta. The exhibition showed to the people in Jakarta the limitless possibily of art.

A painting titled Espace (Space) by Isabelle Connaro for example, looked pretty plain, just a white paper with straight and simple lines, that would be very easy to make with just a ruler and a pencil. But if you look more carefully you would see that the lines are all actually made from the strand of hair of the artist. The straight lines are not as simple as they seemed. The hair must be strained precisely to make it straight without breaking it. In the curatorial Connaro wrote that she made her paintings with hair to create a new volume and dimension, as well as to avoid the movement of the artist to exist in her work.

Another interesting piece of the exhibition was created by Dan Mu, a 1979 Chinese born artist that now stayed and work in France. Dan Mu made a piece that she called Au Fil du Paysage (With the Passing of The Scenery)

It is a three dimensional painting. Placed in one of the rooms in the National Gallery, Dan Mu made a jalinan of black and red Thread. She stuck the threads to one side of the wall to the other side. She made the thread to take shape of wall plants. What’s interesting is that the jalinan of the threads cross over each other and fill the exhibition room. Dan Mu actually wants the people that see her work to “enter” her painting.