Ardi Gunawan Indonesian, b. 1983
Climate Painting #1 , 2025
Acrylic on Canvas
50 x 60 cm
What happens when geographical thinking gets stuck in the pictorial — in the frontal, the recognizable? When that happens, figures and objects start to lose their borders. Their edges blur....
What happens when geographical thinking gets stuck in the pictorial — in the frontal, the recognizable?
When that happens, figures and objects start to lose their borders. Their edges blur. They stop behaving. Using a pouring method, the image slips, slides, mutates. It doesn’t get “painted” — it forms, like an island surfacing out of a spill. The tools aren’t pro-level — a spoon, a chopstick, a hardened brush barely touching the canvas. The process becomes almost machinic.
Both paintings started from a food image I found on Pinterest. That series has been ongoing, but this time I noticed something strange — one of them had been AI-modified. Suddenly, the question of originality felt irrelevant. It’s done. The copy of the copy of the copy is the original now. Sci-fi has taken over the place of the real. Fiction disguises itself as realism. AI hallucinations start to define what we think we see. Everything is real — even the made-up parts. Especially the made-up parts.
The color in these paintings is what I call “rave warteg color” — loud, clashing, a bit too much. It comes from cheap factory-grade paint, the kind used not because it looks good, but because it’s there. Bright green next to harsh orange, yellow, or purple. These colors weren’t designed — they just happened. And that accidental aesthetic, that leftover logic, is something I’m drawn to.
Together, the two works start to talk to each other: a kind of beautiful desert-granny aesthetic meets local vernacular color — innocent, unpretentious, and loud. It’s the artisanal and the AI-modified. The accidental and the staged. Local color and global crisis. A food painting that quietly slips into a climate painting — without ever changing the subject."
When that happens, figures and objects start to lose their borders. Their edges blur. They stop behaving. Using a pouring method, the image slips, slides, mutates. It doesn’t get “painted” — it forms, like an island surfacing out of a spill. The tools aren’t pro-level — a spoon, a chopstick, a hardened brush barely touching the canvas. The process becomes almost machinic.
Both paintings started from a food image I found on Pinterest. That series has been ongoing, but this time I noticed something strange — one of them had been AI-modified. Suddenly, the question of originality felt irrelevant. It’s done. The copy of the copy of the copy is the original now. Sci-fi has taken over the place of the real. Fiction disguises itself as realism. AI hallucinations start to define what we think we see. Everything is real — even the made-up parts. Especially the made-up parts.
The color in these paintings is what I call “rave warteg color” — loud, clashing, a bit too much. It comes from cheap factory-grade paint, the kind used not because it looks good, but because it’s there. Bright green next to harsh orange, yellow, or purple. These colors weren’t designed — they just happened. And that accidental aesthetic, that leftover logic, is something I’m drawn to.
Together, the two works start to talk to each other: a kind of beautiful desert-granny aesthetic meets local vernacular color — innocent, unpretentious, and loud. It’s the artisanal and the AI-modified. The accidental and the staged. Local color and global crisis. A food painting that quietly slips into a climate painting — without ever changing the subject."
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