Art Stage Singapore 2017

Can’s Gallery, formerly known as Galeri Canna, took part in Art Stage Singapore 2017, featuring artworks from three talented artists – Entang Wiharso, Sally Smart and Oky Rey Montha – in the form of paintings and sculptures.

One of the largest objects amongst their artworks is the Exotic Land, sized 195 x 247 cm, by Entang Wiharso. He extends his practice of making cutting aluminium series and gives them more three-dimensional sense as inspired by the form of reliefs as found in a temple. Contrary with the relief of those ancient objects, Entang is fully aware of creating the context of today. His narrative departs from the reality of everyday life, of the meeting point of cosmopolitan life style or urban people and the witty culture from the village. His works are mostly formed in large scale to give monumentality as part of the experience. Entang’s work in this particular series is focused on the idea of a home, either a space of transit or a space where life happens. He tried to capture the basic idea of consuming desire; therefore he includes the image of cars, fashions, and others. In the background, one can find a factory building to underline more the industrialist and late capitalism situation he wants to depict.

The Exquisite Pirate (Rauberromantik), sized 190 x 150 cm, is a painting by Sally Smart. She often combines the sense of three-dimensional works with the two-dimensional imagery with cut and paste technique. Taking inspiration from mural and puppets, she often portrays the figures with fabrics and other materials. In her paintings, Sally highlights her collage technique to emphasise on the cutting and some discontinuity of the lines, giving the sense of unfinished long journey. The strong colour block background provides different landscape for the objects and figures. This is a technique that she does to highlight some objects stronger than the others.

Oky Rey Montha, the painter of The Great, is one of the new generation artists with big influence from popular culture and post-internet art. His painting is a spontaneous response of his flaneurism towards visual world today. He takes lots of inspirations from the visual imageries he found in the mass media he has been consumed, to juxtaposed all the fantasy with some of the small facts in his surrounding. Some of the symbols are associated with political context, while some are merely fictional.