Controlled Coincidence: Iabadiou Piko

Iabadiou Piko

Indonesian artist Iabadiou Piko graduated from Art Photography at the Academy of Design Vision in Yogyakarta ( ADVY ). After graduating, he embarked on a career as a full time painter. His works are full of intuitional elements, lines, shapes, and colors in a way of freely flowing, resembling the tentacles and exits of the artist’s feeling. Piko employs them not only to experience the atmosphere of surroundings, but also to vent the restless emotion out. “I capture memories, feelings and imagination as my visual diary. My work is an allegory and metaphor of what goes around my life.” As a artist, Piko tastes the details inside his heart honestly. Turning the complicated, disorder, and irrelevant thoughts into a piece of work, the artist lets his painting jump between connections freely. Where are the behaviors come from? Where are the anxiety resulted from? Piko has to talk to himself constantly in order to construct the internal and external world through his own imagination and depict the events as well as people he meets in real life.

From the late 19th century to early 20th, when the artists started to show their rising liberty, Edvard Munch and Vincent. Van Gogh became the role of enlightenment and emphasized the individual experience toward the world, making the “Expressionism” commence to grow. As an artist who value personal memories and emotions, Piko regards Munch and Van Gogh as his inspiration. Lively colors, unorganized graphics, and provocative lines illustrate the motive of being Expressionism. “My work is an expression and the memory of behavior and personal feeling of anxiety about the perception of material reality, fantasy and human transformation. Inspire by doodle, lines, images, impression of forms, shapes, colours and environments that I have seen.” The artist is eager to express strong emotions through his painting artwork and allow his personal feelings to be the highest index of creating.

In fact, not merely the artists mentioned above, but the famous artists in 20th such as Joseph Beuys and Antoni Tàpies guide Piko to his painting career. Joseph Beuys is a performance, installation, and conceptual artist who considers the thinking track of artists is important, while Antoni Tàpies is a representative of non-formalism who emphasizes the psychic improvisation when working. Both have a strong influence on Piko. Instead of purely visual impacting, it impacts deeper into the artist’s mentality. Thus, we can discover the trace reflecting time elapsing in his photography, painting, or ready-made works. The trace also becomes the records of mind changing.

Expressionism has emerged for more than a century. There are countless artists fascinated with it. For instance, a Danish painter and sculptor Asger Jorn and a Dutch artist Karel Appel, both can be taken as reference while seeing Piko’s works. In 1948, Jorn and Appel established an art organization “CoBrA” in the name of abbreviation of the city Copenhagen. CoBraA aimed at the practice that artists should regard their works as the real characterization of hearts, with child-like imagery, strong primary color, and lively expressive brushstroke. Comparing the difference in artworks between Piko and the two artists mentioned above, even though the application of color and composition has distinct feature from each other, the viewers are still able to feel the pulsation of artists from their artworks. The paintings then become a joint comprising artists’ vibration in daily life.