Paint for Me #1

Jumaldi Alfi, who grew up in a family of distinguished poets in West Sumatra, turned his back on this literary lineage and instead became a visual artist. This affinity with words and language nevertheless figures in his Blackboard painting, Paint for Me #1, 2010, where text gives visual form to an existential questioning of art and identity. The title is a reference to the late German artist Martin Kippenberger’s 1981 series of photorealistic paintings, Lieber Maler, male mir (Dear Painter, paint for me) that challenged prevailing notions of authenticity, authorship, and subject matter in contemporary painting.

In the same vein, Alfi’s work engages with the legacy of Western painting in Indonesia and the impact of a globalised art world on non-Western contemporary artists. The visual cues of a blackboard and the use of text recall the way Western art theories were transferred to local artists through the educational system established during Dutch colonial rule, as well as the continued influence of Conceptual art and text-based artistic strategies from the 1960s and 1970s on contemporary artists today. The photorealism of the painted blackboard, wood frames, masking tape, and chalk traces attests to Alfi’s strength as a painter. In Paint for Me #1, 2010, the word FIN (French for "end" or "finish") has been spelled out with tape in the middle of a blackboard, surrounded by a mass of chalk scribbles and erasures that interrogate the value and meaning of art. Within this inner monologue, the words FINE and FIN offer contradictory responses to the repeated question, “Are you still alright OK?” Through his visual word play, Alfi proposes that a shift in perspective allows alternative meanings to emerge.