Agus Suwage b. 1959

The painting is in good condition. The canvas is in good condition with a clear and taut surface and no retouching was detected upon examination under ultraviolet light. Paint layers are intact.
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Hendra Gunawan's early forays in Modernism were informed by his experiences as a puppeteer and dukun (faith healer), and his depictions of the daily struggles of the common people or rakyat kecil were expressed as mythological, tragicomic narratives. Agus Suwage seems to have taken over Hendra's helm, imbuing his visual narratives with the same sense of drama, irony and humour.

Agus Suwage however, primarily uses the depiction of his body as the vehicle and medium of his storytelling. A penchant for hefty doses of the absurd is conveyed through the myriad guises of the clown or fool. Suwage's tales are of the problems faced by the rakyat kecil in contemporary Indonesian society. The guises stem from the artists own grappling with multiple identities, as an Indonesian, ethnic Chinese individual, native of Java, global citizen, artist, family member, consumer.

Like a wayang clown with his many topengs (masks), Agus Suwage assumes the roles of these various identities and presents the current dilemmas and futilities of life in Indonesia and in the world today. One of his guises is the clown with a prosthetic pig's snout, a humorous reference to one of the markers of Chinese identity in Indonesia, which is of being a 'pork-eating' ethnic group. At the same time it is obvious that pork is of course haram (prohibited) to Muslims.

Stairway to Paradiso (Lot 44), however, presents a very different kind of protagonists. Here one does not see the clown with the prosthetic pig's snout, but rather the artist as his  naturalistic self, shirtless in a pair of jeans, turning his head back and smiling at the viewer, with an electric guitar strapped on his back. This is the artist as a rockstar on ladder, which immediately associates the work with Led Zeppelin's mega hit, Stairway to Heaven. 

The original reference is of course biblical. Like Jacob who dreamed of angels going up and down the ladder to heaven, the artist sees the names of his artistic heroes floating in the sky. In descending order and written in reverse are the names: Goya, Basquiat, Pollock, Duchamp, Beuys, Vincent (presumably van Gogh), Richter, Warhol, Hockney, Haring, Picasso, Boonma (the late Thai contemporary artist Montien Boonma), Hiroshige, Bacon, Velasquez, Gaguin (sic), Lautrec, De Kooning, Angelo (presumably Michelangelo), Blake, and Giacommeti (sic).

William Blake's illustration of Jacob's Ladder may have been an inspiration for this particular work. The mirror-image reversal of the inscriptions suggest that the artist is not so much looking at the viewer than at himself, which is perhaps another tribute to one of his artistic forebears, Velasquez.

Agus's paintings seem often to express the helpless frustration and bewilderment about contemporary life, whereas the bleakness of life presented in his predecessor Hendra's works is sublimated by humour, hope and the championing of resilience.  In Stairway to Paradiso however, the artist, in looking at his own reflection, seems to contemplate a more personal crisis. What is the smile conveying? Perhaps a sense of excitement about the potential of the future? Like the ladder, can an artist really connect heaven and earth? Or rather, is the smiling figure still the fool, not knowing if he is ascending or descending the stairway as he confronts his megastardom? Whatever the question, there is a sense Agus Suwage is daring himself to do what Hendra always did: to hope.