Jumaldi Alfi

(b. 1973, Lintau, Indonesia)

Jumaldi Alfi is a painter who works sequentially on a set of ideas and themes. He is a graduate from the Institut Seni Indonesia (ISI) in Yogyakarta, and a member of the Kelompok Seni Rupa Jendela (Jendela Art Group), one of Indonesia’s most prominent contemporary art collectives. Alfi is one of the key members of the progressive movement of Indonesian contemporary art, where his pieces present how Western contemporary art affects  Indonesia’s art and society.

Commonly found among Alfi’s works is the urge for immediacy through the drawing, marking, and scribbling, applied over variations of landscapes and scenes, clued by way of elemental aspects such as foreground, horizon, and suggestions of space. Alfi’s markings are feverish, shifting, and ever-transforming, against a tableau that is disconcerting in its fixity and quiet monumentality. This is heightened in his drawings characterised in contrast by the proliferation of figures in various physical and mental states.

In some of Jumaldi Alfi’s works, the spirit of “playfulness” features strongly. With the nuances and signs of this heedless play, a definitive meaning is delayed, or even, often abandoned. In conveying this, Alfi often distributes forms, objects, faces, fragments of landscape, self-portrait, scribbles, text, doodles across his canvas surface unhindered by structure. These forms and things are most easily recognisable, but they become evocative as they roam wildly on the canvas. There are no apparent signs to explain to us the presence of these things and forms, and their meanings. They all seem to run free, merely as detached elements.