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Lot Essay
As explained by Lugas Syllabus, "The Imaginary of Heaven of Art is the picture of our own heaven. A cubism heaven for Picasso, popular heaven for Warhol, and colorful expression by Affandi. In that heaven Dali dreams of the unicorn horn while Raden Saleh is riding the real horse and yet Mona Lisa is still a mystery and to Frida, romanticizing pain is the true beauty…Where are we? Are we still complaining? Do we have nothing? Or do we have everything?"
At the center of modernism lies the notion that art has to be fundamentally and continually rethought. Western arth as always been engaged in an open-ended discourse about the best and truest expression of form. In the universal search for a purity of expression, the East and the West have embarked on different routes and explorations. In Golden Limousine in The Heaven of Art, Lugas Syllabus brings together the titans of modern art across culture and history, and posits the endless possibilities should these figures have had the chance to have a meeting of the minds.
Astride the horse sits the renowned Chinese painter hang Daqian who paved the way for a new style of ink painting, flanked by the father of pop art Andy Warhol, and the great modern painter Pablo Picasso. East and West, often seen as opposing ends of the spectrum are bookended here by figures representing two distinct periods of Indonesian art history – at the head is Raden Saleh who adopted the painterly style of the Dutch colonial masters, and Affandi, who eschewed classical representation in favour of a gestural expressionistic style. In the foreground, we see in resplendent detail, busts of Frida Kahlo and Salvador Dali while interspersed throughout the composition Syllabus has painted in a mimicry of their original style, significant symbols of art history such as Michaelangelo's David, Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, one of Basquiat's distinctive figures and even the sitter from S. Sudjojono's iconic 1939 portrait Di Balik Kelamboe Terboeka.
In this artistic paradise, Lugas amalgamates key icons and styles of art history in perhaps what is his own mind's source of artistic inspiration. In this Arcadia, no one style or individual is greater than the other, and Lugas considers them riding a single horse and heading towards the same direction that must be, as it is for all art, the expression of individual and universal truths.
At the center of modernism lies the notion that art has to be fundamentally and continually rethought. Western arth as always been engaged in an open-ended discourse about the best and truest expression of form. In the universal search for a purity of expression, the East and the West have embarked on different routes and explorations. In Golden Limousine in The Heaven of Art, Lugas Syllabus brings together the titans of modern art across culture and history, and posits the endless possibilities should these figures have had the chance to have a meeting of the minds.
Astride the horse sits the renowned Chinese painter hang Daqian who paved the way for a new style of ink painting, flanked by the father of pop art Andy Warhol, and the great modern painter Pablo Picasso. East and West, often seen as opposing ends of the spectrum are bookended here by figures representing two distinct periods of Indonesian art history – at the head is Raden Saleh who adopted the painterly style of the Dutch colonial masters, and Affandi, who eschewed classical representation in favour of a gestural expressionistic style. In the foreground, we see in resplendent detail, busts of Frida Kahlo and Salvador Dali while interspersed throughout the composition Syllabus has painted in a mimicry of their original style, significant symbols of art history such as Michaelangelo's David, Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, one of Basquiat's distinctive figures and even the sitter from S. Sudjojono's iconic 1939 portrait Di Balik Kelamboe Terboeka.
In this artistic paradise, Lugas amalgamates key icons and styles of art history in perhaps what is his own mind's source of artistic inspiration. In this Arcadia, no one style or individual is greater than the other, and Lugas considers them riding a single horse and heading towards the same direction that must be, as it is for all art, the expression of individual and universal truths.
