Lemuel E. Saputra
My work engages painting and photography as a means of encountering Indonesia’s colonial past through embracing the limitations and tensions between both mediums—fixedness and ambiguity, indexicality and invention, and proximity and distance. Images of colonial Indonesia (from Dutch national archives) are translated and mistranslated using image transfer, collage, and assemblage in combination with painterly mark making. The layered painting surface becomes a screen between viewer and image, creating a push and pull between legibility and obfuscation. Through their sequence and placement in space, each painting begins to function as text, where meaning is constructed by the relationship between individual works. The images’ presentation and re-presentations through various material processes complicates the possibility of any single, fixed reading, questioning the capacity of photography, painting, and the archive to bear witness.
If I Depart, 2024.
Oil on wood panel, 14 × 11 in.
Segala Tak Kukenal (Rawagede), 2024.
Acrylic on wood panel, 9 × 12 in.
Dari, 2024.
Acrylic gouache on mylar, mounted on wood panel, 8 ¾ × 12 in.
Lilit, 2024.
Oil on canvas, 36 × 48 in.
If I Depart and Rawagede (installation view), 2024.
Oil on wood panel, 14 × 11 in.
and acrylic on cyanotype mounted on found wood, 16 × 14 × 3 in.