Darek #1: Bentang Alam (Plateau #1: Landscapes) | A Solo Exhibition by Erizal As

Gajah Gallery Jakarta is pleased to launch Darek #1: Bentang Alam (Plateau #1: Landscapes), a solo exhibition by Erizal As. The show presents a fresh series of works that veer away from his established oeuvre of purely abstract, non-objective art: vigorous landscape paintings of his hometown, West Sumatra. Darek #1: Bentang Alam (Plateau #1: Landscapes) coincides with the opening weekend of Art Jakarta.

During the pandemic, Erizal sought to revisit his home and Minangkabau roots in Padang, which he had left years before to pursue his artistic career in Yogyakarta. To him, returning home meant immersing in nature, revelling in the physicality of a lush land that previously, he could only access through memory. Feeling nature then inevitably became integral to his artistic practice: Initially, he would spend time in nature then return to his studio to create his landscape paintings. Yet, this left Erizal only longing for more time to absorb his environment, developing a distinct process that involved him going back and forth between nature and his studio, collapsing the boundaries between the two. This intuitive call reveals the core of what Erizal perpetually attempts to capture in this series: the richness of a land deeply close and personal to him, yet ultimately beyond his grasp. Tellingly, in several of the works in this series, Erizal’s paint bursts beyond the edges of the canvases—challenging the notion of a framed and contained landscape.

Rather than continuing the static, idealised landscapes of Indonesia common in the colonial era, Erizal’s new paintings dig deep into the history of his place and its ever-shifting natural and cultural landscapes. In the Minangkabau area, movement is an integral part of its story. There is land or darek that forms the core area of Minangkabau area, also known as the Luhak Nan Tigo; and there is a surrounding area called the Nagarai Rantau, containing satellite villages where Minang people eventually spread and settled. Though separated from their original land, the rantau community still identifies ethnically and culturally with the Minangkabau; Together, their lands form the concept of the Minangkabau realm, or alam minangkabau.

Within this context, there is a deeper layer to the vigorous gestures on Erizal’s canvases, beyond merely being stylistic qualities. They communicate this dynamic movement that is deeply connected to the landscapes he paints, brimming with the vital interactions between the different communities of Minangkabau people, those who reside in darek or rantau, who are eternally bonded by their geographical origins. Filled with bold, urgent strokes and the intricate shades of earthy colours, these new paintings portray the raw, rugged beauty of Minangkabau nature not from a distance, but from the perspective of someone deeply immersed in its humanity. Ultimately, they reveal the artist striving for harmony amidst the wild, harnessing the emotional force of his signature abstract style to capture the complexities of belonging to a land.

Erizal As (b. 1979, Indonesia) is renowned for his vibrant abstract paintings that break free from traditional representation. Painting directly on his canvases instead of premeditating a fixed image, he sees intuition and organic improvisation as crucial to his process. Moreover, experimenting with diverse artistic forms and the complexities between them has always been a mark of his oeuvre. Early in his career, one could detect recognisable figures in his paintings: fantastical animals in motion, human figures gracefully playing a musical instrument, for instance. But his instincts towards abstraction were already revealing themselves through his wild, gestural strokes and forms. In his 2016 solo show Refiguring Portraiture and in the subsequent years, he delved deeper into these tendencies and abstracted the faces of human figures completely—a metaphor for humanity’s eroding values and the fragility of our truths and identities.

In 2019, Erizal decided to eliminate the figure entirely and venture into pure, non- representational paintings, which he presented in another solo exhibition, Formless Existence. While he continued to challenge humanity’s conflicted values and truths, expanding these concerns towards the deceptive nature of people in power, he expressed such concerns through a distinctly abstract language. Bold, impasto strokes; dynamic textures and vibrant, contrasting colours serve as vital expressions of realities that are constantly in flux, and thus, formless. Yet, embarking on an unexpected yet natural stylistic shift, Erizal has recently begun experimenting with landscape painting. From 2021, recognisable forms—rolling hills, lush greens, lakes and cliffs—have once again emerged on his canvases. 

Trained at the Indonesian Institute of Fine Art, Erizal has held several solo and group exhibitions in Singapore and Indonesia, and consistently participates in esteemed art fairs across Southeast Asia. His past solo shows include Refiguring Portraiture at Gajah Gallery Singapore (2016) and Formless Existence at Gajah Gallery Singapore (2019).