Opening - Jumaldi Alfi @ STPI

Indonesian artist Jumaldi Alfi and co-founder and member of the Jendela Art Group has shown a slow shifting of themes and styles in his works over the last 10 years.

He started making painting to express his feeling of loneliness, and in many ways his works remain atubiographical notes. Yet he's also exploring more metaphysical themes about life's struggles, identity issues. His most recent series, Blackboard (above the work of post-War German artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Kippenberger and Georg Baselitz, tricked the eyes into believing you were viewing a real blackboard with chalk , and he abadonned, stones and cacti - often foumd in his works as symbols of struggles and hopes - in favor of the scribbling of direct messages.
In his new body of work at STPI “Melting Memories”, he explores life, death, the spiritual, the supernatural, and the physical in a concrete, visual space, returning to his use of symbolism - a cactus on an arid plain personifies survival and the struggle to live, the rock derived from the Greek mythology of Sisyphus, who had to keep on pushing a boulder uphill, symbolises the accession for hope. But he also integrates some of his blackboard elements.