At once playful, irreverent, and unsettling, the works of OoTotol (Dewa Raram) expand the visual vocabulary of Balinese painting into stranger, more subversive terrain. Emerging from the village of Pengosekan in the late twentieth century, his imagery speaks in contradictions: familiar mythological figures stand alongside men in military uniforms, mythical naga intertwine with pigs, cows, and lovers, and heroes from the Ramayana find themselves cheek by jowl with figures in peci caps. Through these unusual juxtapositions, Totol destabilises the cultural codes embedded in Balinese visual traditions—turning the known into the unfamiliar, the sacred into the absurd.
Totol’s fascination with uniformed figures is particularly striking. Rendered with humour and irony, these men and women march, make love, pray, and play, inhabiting a world where the boundaries between political authority, personal desire, and mythological imagination dissolve. His visual language carries the scars of a political landscape marked by surveillance, fear, and the militarisation of daily life, while simultaneously mocking its symbols of power. Totol’s playful distortions—soldiers kissing pigs, mythic heroes clutching bottles of beer—are not mere jokes; they reveal how history, politics, and everyday absurdity intertwine on the island’s cultural stage.
Rooted in Balinese artistic lineages yet reaching far beyond them, Totol absorbed imagery from Sanur and Batuan painting traditions, tourist art, Hindu epics, and even European classical works. By filtering global images through a hyper-local lens, he created compositions that are at once collective and singular, inherited and mutated. His art is deeply contemporary—not because it conforms to global trends, but because it captures universal human entanglements: power and desire, myth and mockery, trauma and humour. In Totol’s world, the village, the nation, and the cosmos co-exist in a delirious, defiant dance.
