SingartBiological Science In Definitive Art
With my initial training in the biological sciences, I have the good fortune of being able to look at a tree and see, in my mind’s eye, the resounding symphony within as every living cell nettle away harmoniously together, from that residing at the tip of the gravitationally furthest root hair to that crowning the very apex of a newly budding leaf.
That, to me, offers more poetry than American Joyce Kilmer’s 1914 published “Trees”, which lyrically depicted a feminine personification of a tree pressing its luscious mouth to the earth’s bountiful breast while piously looking at God and raising its leafy branches to pray.
Now imagine my immense delight when I chanced upon Pearl Lam Galleries’ current solo exhibition, “Abiogenesis: Terhah Landcsape”. Its emerging artist, Syaiful Aulia Garibaldi, creates art that aesthetically visualizes on a large scale the tiny and often overlooked workings of mother-nature to ever so gently remind us of the paramount importance of minute life-forms that… insidiously decompose all manner of waste for no better purpose than to regenerate new life.
In his first solo exhibition outside of Indonesia, Garibaldi puts on macro-view an extremely varied selection of works of art that spans the diversity of mediums, covering all forms of microbes always only visible under the clinic microscope – from stylized paintings of nano-sized bacteria and spore prints to installations involving actual mushrooms, moss and orchids.
His definitively unique reading of life and nature is evident through this quirky use of organic materials in his signature practice of crafting his art; propelling him above the bustling art market quietly, confidently and originally without him losing sight of the great Indonesian masters before him.
That he is able to do so stem from his ordinary start as a student of agriculture and agronomy, with minors in aesthetics and print making, in university. When he finally decided to follow his heart by switching to focus solely on experimental fine arts, he ingeniously applies his scientific background to create an ultra unique conceptual foundation for his art.
As Garibaldi diligently peers into his trusty microscope, he transforms the biological images of cellular growth onto his artistic prints, sketches, paintings and installation art; using them as the alphabet in crafting a completely new language he named ‘Terhah’. Meaning ‘idea’, this ever growing project was so comprehensively thorough he complemented his resulting masterpieces with a complete dictionary.
Enin Supriyanto, 1 of Indonesia’s leading independent curators enthuses that Garibaldi ‘enforces the notion that as material, fungi – or more importantly, new media (in) artistic expressions – are directly related to the need for new languages’.
Supporting this point, Tan Suili, Assistant Director (Programmes) and Curator at the Singapore Art Museum further expounds that ‘like the thread-like body of the fungus which appears to have no beginning and no end, (and) only an ever-expanding network of nodes and connections… the possibilities for a constantly evolving and enquiring art-making process, (when) nourished by its interdisciplinary conjunctions and modalities… are infinite indeed’.
The resulting remarkable strong vision is that of art colliding with science in an ever so graceful manner; with well deserved accolades given to Garibaldi’s interest in the networked and inter-connected nature of ecologies, and the evocative power or micro-organisms as symbols of the endless cycle of death and decay with the persistence of life.
His current exhibition in Singapore takes a fluid dive into what would be akin to the chemist’s alchemy: the myriad artworks cheekily and yet imaginatively explore the scientific notion that inanimate objects have the ability to evolve into living organisms, even though chemist and micro-biologist, Louis Pasteur, had proven experimentally that all life can only come from other living things – the only supportable origin for any living cell is another living cell.
Garibaldi’s artistic foray into this area of science stems from this: all modern theories of ‘abiogenesis’ imagine a scenario in which differing natural conditions create, combine and arrange molecules in such a way that they spontaneously begin to self-replicate. So metaphorically, his invented artistic language ‘Terhah’ becomes magically alive in an artistically compelling world created within infinite boundaries of his lucid imagination.
This stroke of genius stems from his days as a university student when he had conducted experiments that involved releasing droplets of substrate into a petri dish of bacteria and observing the almost script-like patterns traced by the movement of these microbes as they flocked towards their source of sustenance.
And this has expanded to everything else he has ever spied while tirelessly and objectively peering through the informative power of his microscopic lenses: for example, leading him to reap the rich rewards offered in his graphic representations of the constant conjunctive processes, branching out and occasional bearing of mushroom-like fruit in all mycelial growth.
Even then, we have touched only the tip of Garibaldi’s ecologically symbiotic iceberg. Persistently dig ever deeper into the vast extent of his ‘abiogensis’ imagination at Pearl Lam Galleries Singapore, at 9 Lock Road, #03-22 Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108937 before the exhibition ends on 31 May this year.
Top photo: Syaiful Garibaldi’s “Abiogenesis Landscape #9”.
Right photo: Syaiful Garibaldi’s “Abiogenesis – Terhah Landscape #12 (Inner Recesses)”.
Photo credit: Pearl Lam Galleries Singapore
