Page 6 - Hanafi - Home By A New Road

Home by a New Road

My solo exhibition at Komaneka Fine Art Gallery at the close of this year is like going home by a new road
that I have never travelled before. I don’t know if this road leads me home or to some other home. Not every
decision I take to keep moving forward is one of certainty: sometimes the step forward looks like confusion.
Certainty and confusion are both important in the actions I take that bring me closer to my purpose or to
take distance from it. In art, it revolves. Try burning a mosquito coil from the center. We need a new road
to draw new confusion, and further along to weigh the purpose, to go to a different home, in order to keep
moving forward.

The Indonesian artist Hanafi wrote these words on a temporary mural he painted on a wall in the
exhibition space to introduce his show at Komaneka Fine Art Gallery in Ubud, from 7 January to 7
February 2017. The words form part of the landscape — or perhaps rather the seascape — which is like a
grand movement of the heart. The eye catches a wooden trowel for spreading cement, attached to the wall
in the upper right-hand corner of the painting. A bit lower, the trowel is painted realistically, and yet it
becomes a boat, heading home to a massive pier-like construction in the lower left hand corner, where grid-
like marks indicate the windows of home. The light is muted: it glows like the sky after rain.

Thus Hanafi, an abstract painter who conjures the world in atmospheres of great beauty.

Hanafi was born in Purworejo, Central Java in 1960, and studied at the Indonesian Arts High School
(SSRI) in Yogyakarta 1976 –1979. In the 1990s he moved to Jakarta where he still lives and works. Home
has long been a theme of Hanafi’s work, expressed in architectural patterns in his canvases. “I don’t like to
be far from home,” he says. “I’m concerned about looking after my family.” Nonetheless, he has exhibited
in the United States, at the Saatchi Gallery in London and at the Museum of Girona in Spain. His work
has also been exhibited in Canada, China, Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. He has participated in over
80 art exhibitions including the National Gallery of Indonesia in Jakarta in 2002, and in 2004 at the
Gallery Canna in Jakarta and Komaneka Fine Art Gallery in Ubud, Bali.

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