I Gusti Putu Buda

I Gusti Putu Buda's abstract paintings juxtapose urban and rural life. Born in 1973 in the city of Denpasar, Buda studied painting at the Indonesian Art Institute (ITI) and National Arts Institute (STSI). Like the celebrated Balinese artist Made Wianta, Buda makes use of an abstract expressionist vocabulary and a palette of highly expressive colours to represent the landscape of the world around him. Yet his luminous paintings are as much about the destructive incursion of modern life into the heart of the landscape as they are spiritually charged celebrations of the beauty that is left. "The living artist who does not seek beauty in antiquity ... or in the mental world of the tourist, will himself live as long as the world exists." It might be surprising to learn that these provocative words were penned almost 80 years ago by the Javanese artist and activist Sindu Sudjojono (1913-1986). The desire as an artist to bear truthful witness to the world in which he or she exists, as opposed to merely creating fantasies for aesthetics or commercial consumption, is of course a thread that has run strong and constant throughout modern and contemporary art world over.

In Asian contemporary art, where issues such as post-colonialism and the new morphologies of modernity have been central, Sudjojono's statement is particularly resonant. Yet in a place like Indonesia, home of the young painter I Gusti Putu Buda, antiquity is at once both remote and alive; the long interaction between Indonesian artists and their expatriate Western counterparts has created a dynamic that resonates far beyond art tourism. Since the early 20th century Indonesian painters have worked to integrate aspects of Western media and modernist idioms toward the creation of a painting language in which traditional concerns for pattern and form - and for the spiritual codes of nature - could be translated and transposed in a way that rang true for them.

One of the most striking aspects of Buda's style is a highly evocative brushwork technique that creates a marvelous tension between freedom and control. In quietly vibrant works such as those of his recent Portal series (2005), Buda's world is translated into expressively brushed fields of intense colour - yellows, reds, pure shades of white, patches of black - that are then marked by overlays and underscores of brushwork that drips or flows or rushes in and out over the surfaces. That sense of overlay and underscore is also present in the compositional arrangement, in which semi-representational forms suggesting doors, windows, portions of walls or even sheets of rain lead the eye into, out of and sometimes beyond the painting surface. Throughout, the paintings also seem to shimmer with another kind of overlay - an intangible sense of movement and emotion that appears to emanate from the paintings rather than being internal to them. It is perhaps this quality above all that gives Buda's paintings a strong sense of the luminous and the sacred.

Widely exhibited in Indonesia, Buda's works are only now coming to wider attention internationally. The artist has had solo exhibitions in Hong Kong, Singapore and Chicago and in 2004 was nominated as a finalist for the Sovereign Art Prize. The nature of Buda's art is such that it captures the attention quietly. But, once captured, it is willingly held.