米斯尼亞迪

This work is in good overall condition as viewed. Any inconsistencies are due to the artist's working method. Framed.
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“The figure, the human figure is its own drama, its own theatre; it is both actor and story. That’s how I sometimes see it. It’s everything. The figure is acting, is seeing and is telling the story too. It’s the figure that carries everything”
– I Nyoman Masriadi^[1]

I Nyoman Masriadi’s obsessive fascination with the human body, as vessel to divulge the private and public psyche and as site of socio-political commentary, has driven the artist’s expansive oeuvre. Known for his large-scale renditions of hyperbolic masculine tropes, the Balinese-born artist has earned critical success for his ability to condense satire, narrative and personal experience in a distinctly powerful visual language.

Bendera Kaos Oblong (Flag T-Shirt) is yet another momentous work by the artist, punctuated with Masriadi’s usual sharp humour while tinged with a shade of melancholy. A sole male figure stands in absolute rigidity, wearing nothing but a pair of army camouflage shorts and an unwavering stare into the distance. Masriadi frames his main protagonist tightly in a stark minimalist composition in order to accentuate his domineering presence and physicality. His scorched tanned skin has been rendered in Masriadi’s signature sheen, a result of the artist’s painstaking layering of paint to sculpt the figure’s overt musculature. Sinuous veins bulge against the surface of his taunt skin, as he clenches a bamboo pole with a pink t-shirt tied at its end. The Indonesian artist’s painterly world is reputably inhabited by these hulking, unnaturally zealous male figures who speak to something profoundly heartfelt, despite their absurdity.

Together with Masriadi’s extensive vocabulary of symbolic elements, these canvases depict scenarios that are at once deceivingly direct and comically subtle. As underscored in the work’s title, the artist subverts the symbolic meaning of a flag, an object of power and politics. Masriadi suggests that the man has nonchalantly taken off his clothes and hung it on a bamboo stick, making the figure both the subject of interest and the agent of his own ridicule. All the patriotism and pride associated with a national flag belies itself in Masriadi’s makeshift caricature; it is a sagging symbol rather than an icon of strength. Even Masriadi’s deliberate choice of a stereotypically feminine colour for the pink t-shirt flag is a disjuncture from customary practice. Pink coincidentally is also a mix of the red and white bands on the Indonesia’s national flag. Nonetheless, the bare chested man appears oblivious, his intense focus on the task at hand – standing still—comes across as an uncanny disciplinary act.               

Unfailingly, the artist’s aversion to explicit messages imbues his works with a curious ambiguity that encourages different readings from his audiences. Bendera Kaos Oblong brilliantly treads between an image of an amateurish gimmick and the appearance of exaggerated control, a conduit of the artist’s cultivated brand of humour. While Masriadi often plays with spirited facial expressions, it is this character’s stoicism that is the centre of the artist’s mockery, taking his role as a sort of military guard all too seriously. Furthermore, Masriadi toys with viewership—his audience studies the present lot with a concentration akin to the protagonist’s very own fixated gaze and thus moving a pictorial act onto a theatrical stage. In a painting devoid of context, Masriadi insinuates interpretations on multiple levels that reference an irrelevance of authority, vacant facades of security or perhaps inflated egos in contemporary society. 

It is this mastery of satire, which is never bitter but always comical, that is so evident in Bendera Kaos Oblong and continues to fascinate Masriadi’s wide audience. In their own witty ways, each of Masriadi’s paintings impresses upon us messages that transcend normalcy and provoke something daringly personal.

¹ T.K. Sabaptahy, Nyoman Masriadi: Reconfiguring the Body, Gajah Gallery, 2010, p. 115.