Pointillist abstract landscapes of Balinese life
By Ian Tee

Details of ‘Hometown’, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist and Art Porters Gallery.

The dots and dashes in Wayan Novi’s paintings represent a worldview. Hailing from a family of farmers from Angseri village in Bali, Novi’s practice is concerned with expressing the beauty of nature and Indonesian culture. His latest exhibition ‘Tropical Happiness’ continues to tell the story of the artist’s hometown through a personal language of mark-making.

For the artist, the dot is a metaphor for a seed, an individual or a moment in time. Thus, the painting is a collection of marks which come together harmoniously, to create an image from memory. Novi’s pointillist style evinces a patient disposition, as each dot or dash is meticulously laid down one at a time – akin to the labour of planting rice.

Wayan Novi, ‘Hometown’, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 270cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Art Porters Gallery.

‘Ricefields’ (2021) and ‘Hometown’ (2021) pay homage to the artist’s familial background by evoking the terrace structure of rice paddies. Novi fills up the canvas by tessellating scallop-shaped parcels of blue and ochre, each parcel populated with grain-length strokes. The topographical perspective suggested in this abstract landscape mirrors the way Novi paints, with the canvas lying flat on a horizontal plane. By playing with the direction and gradation of his dashes, Novi creates a colour field of varying tonal values when the painting is viewed from a distance.

Wayan Novi, ‘Lake’, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 130 x 150cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Art Porters Gallery.

No doubt, the artist’s adoption of pointillism nods to George Seurat and Paul Signac’s experimentation with colour and perception. This is especially evident in ‘Lake’ (2021) and ‘Full Moon’ (2021), which are entirely rendered using a build-up of dots. With this focused technique, Novi is able to produce more nuanced hues and a deeper sense of pictorial space. The boundaries between shapes are also more ambiguous, creating fluid masses and hazy imprints on the surface.

Yet, what connects these pictures is the relationship between the single mark and the whole image, which can be analogous to that of the individual and their environment. Here, Novi does not simply represent nature but also considers his place in it. Care for the micro and macro is articulated in his abstract landscapes.

Details of ‘Sunrise’ by Wayan Novi, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist and Art Porters Gallery.

Text is a new element introduced in works such as ‘Sunrise’ (2021) and ‘Stream’ (2021). These inscriptions float in the foreground, set against a colour field made up of finely rendered strokes. Though they resemble fragments of Islamic calligraphy, these glyphs are illegible, made-up characters that constitute a deeply personal lexicon of marks. This use of text charts an evolution in Novi’s visual vocabulary, departing from the use of sketch outlines and hidden symbols in paintings from his solo exhibition ‘Landscape of Memories’, also at Art Porters Gallery, in 2018. Rather than holding the image with distinctive iconography, the artist’s new all-over compositions keep the viewer’s eye gliding across the surface. The repetitive marks and unfolding pattern suggest a continuous space that extends beyond the edges of the painting.

Novi’s painterly treatment is also found enveloping common household objects. However, rather than simply coating the actual items, he reconstructs their form with galvanised zinc. The resulting toy-like sculptures display handmade imperfections, their surfaces embellished with marks in pastel tones and blues. Again, he references the quotidian moments in Balinese village life through his choice of subject matter: earthenware, oil lamps and ritual pouring vessels. Novi’s sense of identity remains inextricably tied to his hometown, much like older generations of Balinese artists who similarly draw inspiration from local tradition and religious rituals. His uncle, the artist Putu Sutawijaya, whom Novi travelled to Yogyakarta with is a particularly important figure in the young painter’s life. That period represented a major leap of faith as Novi was initially reluctant to leave his family behind to study at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts (ISI Yogyakarta). Sutawijaya also runs Sangkring Art Space, a platform that has exhibited many emerging artists, including Novi.

Within the larger context of Indonesian painting, the pointillism in Novi’s work sets him in dialogue with the Dutch painter Arie Smit, who settled in Bali after the Second World War. An influential founder of the Young Artist style, Smit is best known for naïve depictions of village life executed in his signature “broken colours” style. His paintings are composed of mosaic-like blocks of colour with slivers of underpainting left visible, which keeps the overall image fresh and vibrant. Much like the Impressionists, both Smit and Novi’s approaches evince great interest in the way light is captured in painting.

However, one major point of difference is the degree of abstraction in their paintings. Overt representation of the subject matter is consistently apparent in Smit’s work, making reference to rice paddies, Balinese temples and ordinary people going about their daily activities. In contrast, the abstraction in Novi’s canvases reflect an engagement with rural life and landscape from a distance, through recollection instead of observation. The young artist’s sentimentality for childhood home shines through, in soft light and pillowy hues of tropical happiness.

‘Tropical Happiness’ is on view at Art Porters Gallery, from 1 July to 8 August 2021.