Exhibition Essay
Alam dan Hal-Hal yang Tak Selesai (Nature and Other Unfinished Things)
by Ong Kar Jin
It began on May 29, 2006, not with fire, but with earth exhaling black mud. Within days Sidoarjo’s fields and lanes were wreathed in steam and slurry. This “Lapindo” mudflow, so named after the gas company drilling that day, has since gushed about 180,000 cubic meters of mud every twenty-four hours. In the glow of Indonesia’s evening news, it was proclaimed one of the largest mud volcanoes on Earth and the country’s most costly disaster. By now the mud has displaced more than 40,000 villagers in Sidoarjo, poisoning soil and water with toxins that has left hundreds ill.
Six months later, the front page of Jawa Pos Minggu captured the catastrophe’s new, surreal register: a troupe of dukun, shaman healers, travelled from Sumatra to “seal” the wound the engineers could not, and hurled a sacrificial goat into the mud. The Jawa Pos image is brutally simple: an ashen horizon, sulphuric vapour billowing like low cloud, and—caught at the precise crest of its parabolic arc—a goat, limbs splayed, muzzle flung sky‑ward. Three men in black batik-silk baju adat extend their arms as if directing traffic. One holds the switch-thin branch that moments earlier had prodded the animal forward. Below, the mud pool looks less like earth than liquefied asphalt: opaque, industrial, bottomless. Sacrifice photographed at shutter-speed becomes choreography, catastrophe masquerades as theatre. The caption TAK MASUK AKAL (“Makes No Sense”) blames superstition, but the scene is rational in another lens: a community, abandoned by corporate indemnity and in the limbo of litigation, resorts to metaphysics because geology and government will not listen.
Growing up near this wounding landscape, Banny Jayanata learned early in his life that maps are but provisional contracts with the earth. “Yes, that’s right, especially the road to Tretes, Malang, and Batu kept getting disrupted and jammed. And the man-made dikes meant to hold the mud broke again and again”, the toll road closed “for a really long time,” and detours became muscle memory. The disaster’s taxonomy (natural-versus-man-made) was academic to a teenager: “Even though it was triggered by underground drilling, people eventually called it a ‘natural’ disaster, though clearly it wasn’t purely natural.”
Slow disasters unnerve more than the sudden kind. An earthquake is brutal, but brief. A flood can be measured in days. But this mud kept coming. Life did not stop, it just bent around the mud. And in the wake of it: No resolution.
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Banny Jayanata’s canvases declare their lineage before the first brushstroke dries. A lone figure wading through a turquoise swamp; mangrove roots clawing at a bruised sky; a hand reaching, quasi-Caspar David Friedrich, toward a cloud of butterflies. This is textbook Romantic staging: nature as mirror of the soul, the painter-wanderer dwarfed (and moralised) by a verdant sublime. Like Wordsworth or Emerson, Banny presents landscape as both confessional and cathedral; like Raden Saleh, who imported European Romanticism to colonial Java, he bathes the tropics in drama and reverence. Even his palette of damp pinks and luminous greens recalls that “sensation-first” ethos Edmund Burke prized when he linked beauty to pleasure and the sublime to trembling awe. In short, Banny’s Nature is capital-N Nature, an idealised elsewhere where spirit and scenery fuse.
But to romanticise is also to risk installing what philosopher Timothy Morton calls an “aesthetic screen”: a soft-focus filter that flatters the eye while insulating us from genuine entanglement. If Morton is right, does Banny merely repaint that screen in pastel colours?
The question sharpens when the paint thickens. Banny’s approach to nature and his dedication to thick impasto proclaims sincerity, but sincerity alone can sedate. Figuration courts empathy, yet empathy without indictment curdles into sentimentality. Consider Painter Walks Alongside Shy Otters. The copper water glints like treasure; only a second glance reveals the figure half-sinking. Is that dissonance sharp enough to pierce comfort, or soft enough to be mistaken for melancholy décor above a sofa in Jakarta?
Raden Saleh’s lions tore Dutch uniforms to ribbons; Banny’s adversary stays offstage. By universalising the wound, he risks blurring its perpetrators. Banny courts the danger Morton describes. His swamps contain no oil rig, his butterflies dodge no smoke. Set adrift from smartphones, factories or plastic, the images feel timeless—mythic bards wandering an Eden that never quite existed. That temporal dislocation offers contemplative refuge, but it can slide into nostalgia, allowing viewers to project serenity where dread is warranted. The painting becomes a sanctuary that brackets out late-capitalist scars.
Baudelaiure knew that beauty and rot intertwine. In “Une Charogne” (“A Carcass”), Baudelaire’s lover witnesses the radiant sun making carrion “blossom like a flower”. If Baudelaire shattered complacent prettiness by making rot radiant, Banny risks the reverse—making rot look elegiac enough to escape discomfort. If the Romantic screen once empowered resistance (Saleh’s predators mauling empire), it now threatens to anaesthetise urgency.
The show’s title declares that The Garden Bites Back, but does the bite draw blood or merely graze?
Such tensions align Banny with contemporaries who pry open pastoral veneers. Consider Walton Ford: like Banny, he revives 19th-century naturalist imagery, yet Ford’s Audubon-like watercolors hide disturbing depths, straddling the lines between the fantastic and frightening. Ford’s work is overt and satirical where Banny’s is lyrical, but both inject unease into pastoral panoramas. In the same spirit, the late Bree Jonson (1991 – 2021) flooded her canvases with snakes, simians, and wild dogs that stand in for human appetites and ecological precarity. In her depictions of feral entanglements, she delivered a brooding cautionary tale—less a landscape than an autopsy of paradise lost. Others confront crisis head-on: Olafur Eliasson famously hauled melting icebergs into city plazas to dramatize climate change (asking, “Can an encounter with art be more effective than cold, hard facts?”).
By contrast, Banny prefers gentleness. He does not place ice in our hands but holds up a painted mirror. Through close detail and symbolic gesture, he attempts a quiet re-tuning of the viewer’s gaze, trusting lyric tenderness over shock-and-awe.
It is a kind of leap of faith that an artist offers to his viewers. Yes, nature here may be drawn as refuge, but it is no innocent sanctuary. The anticipated communion with nature never quite arrives: butterflies alight then flutter away, the pastoral god never appears. The line Banny navigates is thus: he romanticizes nature yet simultaneously exposes the limits of that vision. By refusing to resolve this tension, his paintings become open-ended poems rather than manifestos, caught between affirmation and negation of the Romantic ideal.
In 2025, to paint a swamp with earnest awe is, to borrow Hal Foster’s phrase, “anachronistic on purpose.” That anachronism can read as either rebellion or retreat. Rebellion, because sincerity is unfashionable in a market that prizes deadpan irony, and to insist on beauty and emotion is to jam a crowbar into late-capitalist cynicism. Retreat, because lush brushwork risks lulling the viewer into reverie just when the planet needs alarms.
None of this is an argument for didactic agit-prop. It is, however, a reminder that Romantic longing and Anthropocene dread occupy the same historical minute. A pastoral image today cannot plead innocence; it either interrogates its lineage or extends the lullaby. Banny’s canvases hover ambivalently between those poles. He revives an old Indonesian tradition of celebrating nature’s beauty yet floods it with ambiguity and foreboding. This double vision of nature as tender and tragic invites its audience to confront that tension in quiet meditation rather than activist outrage. It asks us, as Baudelaire did, to feel nature’s poetry while risking what Morton warns about: that we might admire the tapestry even as the threads unravel.
Frank O’Hara once greeted his own poem with the cheeky fanfare, “Here I am, the centre of all beauty!”, a line equal parts swagger and self-mockery. Banny emulates that audacity each time he centres subjective wonder on a canvas. Despite his reserved nature, Banny seems willing to gamble that Romantic feeling still carries teeth.
***
If we search these paintings for prescriptions, we repeat the Lapindo error: imagining that one more engineer, one more ritual goat, will finally seal the vent. Banny offers, instead, what Pramoedya Ananta Toer once demanded of literature: the capacity to “menciptakan kenyataan baru”, to conjure a new reality beside a broken one. His canvases practice a politics of tremor: they vibrate rather than resolve, keeping the viewer in a state of ethical aftershock where neither cynicism nor sentimentality can fully land.
What remains, then, is a grammar of suspension: objects, bodies, even colours held mid-air, neither falling nor saved. Banny’s canvases adopt that tense. In Painter Walks Alongside Shy Otters the central figure advances yet never arrives: one foot poised above water the hue of corroded copper, the other already vanishing in silt. In Fallen Tree and the Nature of Men five torsos strain under a trunk that appears to hover one brush-hair above complete collapse. Both scenes feel paused at the same impossible apex as the goat: the split-second before gravity reminds everyone who rules.
Just like the goat caught mid-flight, arced between faith and futility, Banny’s compositions hover inside an interval unresolved. The animal never lands, the mud never closes, the prayer never quite works; likewise, his figures never reach shore, his fallen tree never finishes crushing or being lifted. Painting, for him, is the perpetual freeze-frame of an unfinished calamity: a way to stare at the mess while it is still moving and say this is the truth of the moment, because nothing has healed yet. In those arrested gestures we hear the same verdict Lapindo passed on an entire district: there will be no neat ending, only the discipline of living inside the pause.
It could be that is why his canvases remain stubbornly figurative in an age of data dashboards and climate graphs. Where numbers flatten, paint trembles; where policy offers deadlines, mud offers the unceasing. Banny gambles that sincerity (an unfashionable word perhaps) can still wound, that to hold a moment of paralysis on canvas is to keep the pondering open long enough for inflection, or at least memory, to seep in.
Perhaps that is the most radical gesture available to a painter growing up in the backdrop of a disaster that will outlive him: to build images that stay unfinished, as Lapindo is unfinished; to insist, with every trembling brushstroke, that beauty and responsibility are not mutually exclusive but mutually aggravating. When the mud finally cools, perhaps decades or centuries from now, these surfaces may read as field notes from a crisis that was never declared over. Until then they ask us, in Goenawan Mohamad’s quietly devastating question, “Tapi apa arti roh tanpa tubuh yang buncah dan terbelah?” / What is the meaning of the soul without the ruptured and split flesh?
If Lapindo taught him that maps are provisional contracts with the earth, painting offers a counter-contract: an agreement to stay present while the ground keeps shifting. Aye, we remain in the realm of unfinished things, but here, unfinishedness is not a failure. It is the only honest grammar left.
— ONG KAR JIN, May 2025
Variation No. 1
2025
Oil, beeswax, oil pastel, natural pigment on canvas
25 × 30 cm
Listen to accompanying sound piece by André Abujamra