By Priya Tuli

Indonesian painter Erica Hestu Wahyuni's naive art speaks of her delight in life fantastic twists and turns.

Naive art knows no cultural or social boundaries as the work of young Indonesia artist Erica Hestu Wahyuni attests. It is practiced throughout the world being pro-particularly significant work being produced in Eastern Europe, the Americas, and in Asia. Naive art speaks directly to the eye and to the emotions, uninhibited to the trained painterly concerns. Yet, this is not to say that it is unskilled, though it is practiced primarily by self-taught artists. The outstanding naïve artist of modern times was Rousseau. He not only represented the astonishing quality and sensitivity on naïve art but also the seriousness of the artist's approach to it while fending of the more gratuitous critics. The success of naïve art is such that it has influenced many mainstream, professionally trained artists in this century.
Some of the most immediately striking aspects of naïve art are it its apparent simplicity, its raw emotion, its startling sophistication behind its overt "unsophistication," and its strangely magical qualities. The work of Erica Hestu Wahyuni, a trained painter turned naïve, has all of these qualities. The images in her oils and watercolors are fresh, immediate; they are a blast of freshness to much of the more pretentious "serious" work that can be seen in Asia.
Wahyuni's vibrant colors and larger than-life images fill all her canvases. The thick, heavy lines, the oddly juxtaposed colors and figures touch long-forgotten chords of relationship and stir up a collective consciousness of childhood and family, of play and dream. Training Center (1996) and Queen of the Forest (1996) are about freedom and games, a magical independence of the kind of story-telling that pervades childhood. Though the colors and images have a certain wildness to them that may appear haphazard to the viewer, it is all intentional. Wahyuni is determined to stimulate the psyche at some deep, half-forgotten level to revive those memories of a time when life was new and full of wonder. It is this feeling of exuberance and ingenious lack of adult "sophistication" that immediately strikes the viewer about Wahyuni's art and holds the eye.
The scale of Wahyuni’s canvases is large. It is almost as if she is saying to the viewer that we need space to have fun and to play, to be a family, to be friends, to dream,
Her muse, though contained within the frame, suggests life outside the frame, in worlds with limitless dimensions. The sense of space and timelessness and physical arrangement in her style shows Wahyuni to be clearly at home with the spontaneity of naive art and the rejection of the traditional and classical tenets of spatial perspective, dimension, and form. The distorted architectural world and figurative narrative to be found in such works as We Gave Each Other Gifts (1995), Spirit of Life (1996), A Herd of Horses (1996), and Sun/cc City (1996) does not detract from the impact of such scenes on the eye. Indeed, the wrenching of the accepted norms of space and perspective enhances and enlivens each scene, bringing it closer perhaps to our inherent understanding of the true nature of everyday chaos.
Born in 1971, Wahyuni studied at the Art Institute in Yogyakarta. While a student she was part of a group of painters, including Heri Dono, Edi Hara, and Faisal, who formed the vanguard of the “Naive” movement that swept the campus at that time. The influences glimpsed in Wahyuni’s work are reminiscent of three distinct schools of painting: Naive art, as found in the abstracted fantasies of Henri Rousseau and characterized by bright colors, intricate detailing, and flat space; Art Brut, a term coined by French artist Jean Dubuffet in 1945 to mean “raw art," or “art at its purest and crudest,” with reference to the art of children, Naive artists, and the mentally ill; and Primitivism, which refers to the childlike imagery abundant in modern art that reflects a yearning to escape adulthood and epitomized in the paintings of Paul Klee. Despite these influences. Wahyuni’s simplicity of expression is very much her own. “My paintings are bright and happy because that is how I see life,” she says.
The cheerful, bold colors express the guileless art of a young woman who takes pride in being ‘simple.’ “We are not rich people. I have a very simple life, living in Yogyakarta near the Kraton, which I love. My family means everything to me my painting also. These are the important things in my life. My favorite painting is We Give Each Other Gifts,” she says. “In this painting, there is my husband, my daughter, and my favorite animal: the elephant. We are all very happy and I love them so much I want to give them the world. But I can only paint, so I give them this.”

The painting is dominated by red and yellow, universal colors of happiness. Abundantly detailed, it tells the story of a happy family that enjoys doing things together-a Sunday afternoon drive, a visit to Sea World, her daughter sleeping (standing up, suspended mid-painting, to the right). Wahyuni’s down-to-earth attitude makes a refreshing change from the glib, superficiality of the art circuit of which she rarely participates. “For me, painting is like breathing. I must work everyday. I might be happy, or terribly sad, or even very angry hut I still have the power to paint. I have to work. My best work happens the those are my favorite paintings," she says.
Free and unfettered as the fantasy world of a child, her images and her narrative, however, are complex. While the figures are uni-dimensional, every painting tells a story. In Working Together, the story is that of her friends, a husband and wife, who have a stall at a festival. There is scant regard for spatial planes, where one figure is standing horizontally along the vertical plane, seemingly suspended, juxtaposed against one seated.

The enormous appeal of the rules. And yet, to break the rules you first have to know them. In her work color and content have always been more important than texture and form. "When I start a painting, sometimes I already have an idea (or) a story in my head. Then I just start to paint straight onto the canvas-no preliminary sketches," she says. "When I don't feel like painting I draw. Just small pencil drawings on paper. I used to love drawing cartoons because life seemed funny to me and it's nice to make people laugh."
It is this good sense of fun that comes through in her painting, even as a child. "Since I was about seven years old; my family and friends used to call me 'pelukis kecil' (little pointer). I used to paint my friends and things I saw around me. I used to paint life and my dreams. Sometimes my dreams were very real, as if another from an other. Even now I have dreams like this and when I wake up I feel is this real, or was that real."
Sweet Dreams find her asleep on her bed (at the top of the canvas symbolize she is dreaming) with carved elephants at either end and a crescent moon above. Below the bed is her dream-Wahyuni, the woman dancing. The blue of the bed signifies the night and the red of the background, the elephant, and the fish indicate a happy moment that induces her to dance. Why this preoccupation with elephants? They almost like a leitmotif in most of her work, either as part of the main action or tucked away in some obscure corner-almost lost but still very much there.
"you notice," she says and shows me a gold elephant charm that hangs from a chain around her neck an elephant ring that she always wears. "The elephant is very special for me. It is a big and powerful animal, like my ambition. It moves slowly and patiently, step by step. This is how I want to progress-one thing at a time. Another painting I like is Elephants Traveling in Metropole (an enormous five piece acrylic-on-canvas work measuring 195x1000 cm in predominantly rd). My favorite animals, my happiness color."
As in the paintings of children, color and from are of symbolic significance that is often obscured to the viewer and consequently open to a variety of interpretations but clear to the artist. This is illustrated in the work entitled Portrait of my Grand mother.
The grandmother of the piece is Simbok, not Wahyuni's real grandmother but her mother's old family retainer who raised her up, and now also helps to take care of her daughter, Yashinta. "simbok has know three generations of my family and we love her very much. She is family to us. You can see I've painted all the things Simbok likes to do-relaxing under the sawu (sapodilla) tree in the garden, listening to the radio, and watching Ketoprak (traditional drama from Central Java) on TV."
Three little yellow-for-happy Yashinta's float around Simbok's head, signifying the bond be tween them. "Some times people look at my work and say, 'even a child can paint like that.' Yes, that's because children's paintings are pure-they are real, from the heart. It's what you feel. Adults' paintings are grown up and don't show their feelings. My painting has always been like this and my style has stayed with me since child hood, and (it has) grown up with me. I don’t; forget how I feel."



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Priya Tuli
Ph: 765-7921
Jakarta