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0.00 miles on the Cab Web
2005
520 x 120 cm (tryptich)
Acrylic on canvas





Dikdik Sayahdikumullah

Dikdik Sayahdikumullah (born 1973 in Majalengka) finished his study at the Art and Design Department, Bandung Institute of Technology in 1997 and gained his master's degree, also from the Art and Design Department, Bandung Institute of Technology, in 2001. Dikdik now lives in Bandung, working as an artist and lecturer in his alma mater. His solo exhibition took place in 2004, under the title of “Edited Memories” at the CP Artspace, Jakarta. He has also participated in various group exhibitions, such as “Aku, Chairil, dan Aku” at the Nadi Gallery, Jakarta (2005); “Objectify,” also at the Nadi Gallery, Jakarta (2004); “Exploring Vacuum II” at the Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta (2003); CP Open Biennale at the National Gallery, Jakarta (2003); “From Abstract to Metafor” at the Adira Gallery, Bandung (2002); “Traditionelle und Zeitgenossische Kunst aus Java”, Gruppenaustellung, Postdam-Berlin (2002); and the Contemporary Asian Art Fair at Singapore International Convention and Exhibition Center (2001).

The painting 0.00 miles from Cab Web signifies the awareness to comprehend paintings in their role to retain mental and physical health of human's life and humanity—such mental health in Sundanese, a language Dikdik understands, is called jagjag. Paintings, for Dikdik, exert a retention power to maintain such health. 0.00 miles from Cab Web is a painting of cityscape showing the various encounters of problems, such as: the reality about the articulation of individual attitude toward objective communal experience; the representation in the depiction of the city related to the unrepresentation of rurality; the experience of the subject in the present and the past, the present and the future; and the development of painting traditions among the tendencies of abstract and representational paintings. Since the 19th century, including during the Impressionism, modernity is expressed as a representational form signifying the fleeting condition, mutable and dynamic at the same time. The representation of “vagueness” in this painting, however, does not strictly depict the subjective optimism being in constant motion; it portrays also the “hazy” situation stating the “unrepresentable condition.”

0.00 miles from Cab Web is a situation of the journey to seek manifestations of modernity; it is a depiction of the journey from rurality to urbanity. Since the 19th century, art has started to be viewed as an ideal realm able to attain the re-integration of the individual personality and simultaneously the social totality. Art, including painting, is a manifestation of such effort. Art is then gradually identified as a search for beauty no longer found in individual human experience. Experience about art is no longer a manifestation of values and conventions inherited (i.e. tradition); rather, it refers more to the condition of modernity: to the matters experienced in present-day experience. To Dikdik, the problems facing the art of painting today is the crisis of representation triggered by the explosion of the world of picture. The advance of audio-visual representational media today has subdued all appearances of language and meaning representations creating human perception about life as a whole. Painting, therefore, should have the power to provoke human's (or the audience's) perceptual power in order to create the healthy situation of humanity. This would then enable us to navigate through the situation of temporal and spatial confusions due to the condition of modernity. A journey toward the condition of modernity, therefore, is also an awareness to experience the journey, an adventure that never forgets from where we are, going toward the intended direction. (Rizki A Zaelani)

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