Through art, Christine Ay Tjoe tells what the future beholds in terms of human trends and what she sees between the good and the inner demon.
At a glance, Christine Ay Tjoe’s paintings are visually beautiful with a hint of seduction. She mixes the best of both worlds, the aesthetic of bold and pale colors, all centrifugally driven. Strong, visible brushstrokes and partially rubbed out areas of paint seemingly provide a sense of chaos and energy, as if beauty morphs into abjection and equilibrium dissolves into disharmony; which speaks a lot in one of her painting, “I am High, and Overrated.”
In “Demonic Possession”, the artist, who began her career as a graphic artist and experimented with dry-point technique which taught her a lot about the sharpness and lines, focuses her powerful emotions and deep psychological fears by using strong colors, with a predominance of earthy browns and blood red. Intense, while at the same time embracing the notion of physical and metaphysical levels within works.
Christine Ay Tjoe, named as one of Indonesia’s most prominent female contemporary artists, presents her new paintings at White Cube, North Galleries, Bermondsey, London from 13th July – 11th September 2016. Her work is delicate to the point of fragility and reveals the two distinct worlds; an internal world full of inner thoughts, melancholy, struggle, pain, and happiness that seems to reflect her personality and personal life. The other is the human beings of modern society we’re heading to.
In the rest of her works, Ay Tjoe tends to put some figurative and partial animal characters accidentally, which are metaphors for figures of authority, suggesting powerful witnesses, all forces that influence and shape our behavior. These inner demons, which are cultivated by people who are born into power, intermingle with society, merge into something unseen or unspoken. If only you look deeper into her soft colored and playful paintings, these layers are there, hidden underneath, stated whether people have the power to hide or just simply show it.
Using delicately applied oil bar, which images can range from suggestive figurative forms to intense dramatic passages of abstraction, leaves us large blank areas of the canvas. Ay Tjoe looks at our global, consumer age: its hyper-urbanity, density of population, information overload, inevitable greed, and competitive drive.
Photo by White Cube Bermondsey
