Page 7 - Hanafi - Home By A New Road

“Coming Home” is the theme of a series of exhibitions of artists whose work was shown at Komaneka
when they were still developing and have since gone out into the world and received international
recognition. Bringing their recent work back to Komaneka is a kind of homecoming.

Hanafi, who paints every day whether he feels like it or not, says that he paints “whatever is happening.”
He cites a motto: To paint is to paint that which you cannot paint (Melukis itu, melukis yang tidak
bisa kamu lukiskan). He is also very concerned with the experience of chaos and indecision. “It’s a
kind of questioning, a reconstruction.” This is why he calls this exhibition a new road home. “It is
important to always take a new road, even to a familiar destination: it will entail indecision and
confusion” — which to Hanafi is almost an energy, a state of mind fertile for discovery. Part of
Hanafi’s discipline is to seek to liberate the line from its function and apply it instead as a pattern.
This requires a continual inner interrogation.

Among the works exhibited at COMING HOME is a long table with carefully placed small paintings
framed in mats. This is meant to suggest a New Year’s Eve banquet. But near one end is a pile of these
works for people to shuffle through. This disorderly (but judiciously placed) pile is meant to introduce
an element of chaos. “Not everything that is orderly is right,” he says. “Or so I suspect.”

The large canvases in this exhibition are luminous fields of light in muted hues, in which appear
dense visual events and flurries of lines organizing and animating the space. Hanafi’s use of color is
spare and is inspired from the urban earth of his childhood: terracotta roof tiles, cement. The works
are deeply compelling. Asked how it is that they are so beautiful, he says, “Beauty is like an orchestra.
It’s composed of many elements: there is cleanness, emptiness, polemics; there is order and confusion,
flatness and volume.”

But what most illuminates the works is perhaps the artist’s purity of intention — a commitment to
paint only what springs from the spirit.

7