Jumaadi's work

Juma Adi’s work By John Clark A series of brown lands subdivide a small line of watercolours with variegated skies: some red, some yellow, some green-blue. Large iconic words appear as if in a biblical intonation on a painting by Colin McCahon; T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, 1922 is cited as text over some of the panels. Another works cites Javanese, or parts of The Koran. Juma Adi’s work declares unmistakably it is sympathetically literate between many visual and verbal cultures. What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water….. Juma Adi’s citation from The Waste Land goes on: Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Juma Adi voyages through an elegiac desert, one which speaks multiple cultural references without privileging any in particular. He has spent time in the bush, in the desert, in the rural farmlands of Australia: he knows the countryside of Java where his family were fish farmers, he knows its industrial desolation in mud disasters. He understands too the burdens men and women carry, carved out in stereotype as stock characters from a wayang whose theatrical as much as quotidian destinies are unclear to their bearers. Now these figures are carved in wood and molded into metal shapes for the discernment of exemplary patrons. For me it is the cardboard cut-outs they are based on which stumble and stagger best, whose burdens can never be quite put down or their moving ended. This work attempts a poetics of the visual through the concretion of images or their momentary flickerings which serve as allegories of human effort, or loneliness. Elements of climate or the landscape they enshroud mark an incommensurable time of human communication, only possible when all the other traces are removed. Juma Adi is pre-eminently a literary artist well versed in his own modern culture’s poetics, particularly Sitok Srengenge. The drizzle leaves speckles on the face of the sea pierced for a moment and then gone like memories The wind and the violent water groan, the rock cliff scoured you and I founder before the dusk dies down Someday you will hear my voice, and I your voice, when that score of rock-climbers have all turned to dust From ‘Twelve Apostles, Port Campbell’, 2002, in Sitok Srengenge, On Nothing: Selected Poems (Various translators, Prologue by Nukil Amal) Depok: KataKita, 2005. Maybe Juma Adi was fortunate in his selection of Indonesian art heroes before he came to Australia to study for his BFA in 2000 and MFA in 2008: He studied at a Mohammediyah pesantren, he looked carefully at Moelyono, Affandi, and Hendra Gunawan. These base his replicated figures, but whose mood is muted, almost self-consciously resisting the baroque expression of Indonesian precursors. He had hung out with poets like Rendra then learnt about Auerbach and Giacometti from his National Art School teachers Aida Tomescu, Euan Macleod, and David Serusier. He had gone to do photography with his girlfriend and ended up doing painting. How many other Indonesian artists working between paintings and low relief have such an intimate knowledge of so many European and Antipodean artists, out of fashion and out of Indonesian art history? A very particular and resolute kind of sensibility must drive this exploration, one not often found in the fashion and strut of Jakarta’s ‘globalist’ art world. The bends of eucalyptus stems, the dance of time, The dying dim light, the blurred stone veins, Your body absorbs the twilight, the pillow of winter, The bonfire, the shrill of kookaburra, the whimpering wind Sitok Srengenge, ibid from ‘Dance of Eucalyptus’, 2002. Of course his appeal is direct through a sort of paradigmatic figuralism, but it is subtle nonetheless. We are looking at a journey through beguiling mists and despoiled landscapes. But this is a literalism of allegory; nothing stands quite for what it seems and to form meaning must be seen in a series, a procession of overlaps, a cutting of cardboard shapes into wood, then hard metal. PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 3