JUNE 10TH, 2022
Each week artists are commissioned for a piece of art through the UNDRGRND Grant Program. 100 NFTs are minted and are randomly airdropped to UNDRGRND Membership Cardholders. To find out how you can be featured as an UNDRGRND Artist check out our Discord.
Every season always has its own story. As a country with a tropical climate that stretches on the equator, Indonesia only experiences two seasons: the dry season and the monsoon season. Sometimes the dry season comes too long and dries up wells, shrivels flowers, even life.
Ilham Karim recounted his experience of the dry season and tried to express its scorching heat in The Sunbather. A young guy in a green t-shirt and shorts in a shallow water swimming pool. His right leg is bent and resting on the wall. It looks like he's observing the knee while putting his right hand on it. He seems to be thinking or contemplating something. Ilham often shows this unique pose in his works. These unusual gestures and poses represent the anxiety that usually occurs in Karim.
The poses displayed in Karim's works are metaphors for his daily inner experiences. Most of the illustrations show the figure of a man with long curly hair in a ponytail. Perhaps the figure describes Karim himself. The man is sometimes depicted tying his hair or lying face down on a pillow with one foot on the floor while the other is held high as if in a ballet. In Dreams (2020), Karim depicted his character sleeping upside down, with his head as a support. This illustrated his struggle with irregular sleep rhythms that affected his physical and mood.
The subjects appear in poses that look uncomfortable for us to imitate. Perhaps Karim purposely does that to bring the audience into the experience or try to understand the discomfort he often experiences. However, Karim still expresses displeasure in bright and intense colors like turquoise, orange, teal, cobalt blue, and cerulean.
In The Sunbather, the pool symbolizes the urge to cool off physically and mentally. The bright colors such as green, cerulean blue, yellow, and lemon create an optical illusion effect on the pool water and walls. The vivid colors of the water and the walls wrap the contemplation pose that harbors anxiety. This play of colors seems to show the human tendency to always look strong and pleasing beneath their sadness and gloom.
The Sunbather is taken from the title of a painting by renowned British artist David Hockney (1966), and this is not without reason. Karim deliberately took the visual elements that characterize Hockney and interpreted them into his version. Hockney, who gained popularity back in the 1960s, had a particular interest in swimming pools. Hockney tried to capture the play of light through optical illusion effects that he created through bold line patterns and bright, cheerful colors—one of the typical 1960s psychedelic works.
Like Hockney, in this work, Karim recreates the sparkling waves of water bathed in sunlight by using wavy lines and colors that represent sunlight on the water's surface. The interlocking lines imply the impression of motion and, at the same time, form a network of patterns that makes the image appear 2-dimensional. Contrast with a realistic human figure. This figure is what distinguishes Karim's version of The Sunbather from Hockney's.
Karim seemed to show interest in Hockney's works. Apart from The Sunbather, Karim also made a rendition of another Hockney's work, A Bigger Splash. A Bigger Splash and The Sunbather have a similarity. Both artworks feature a swimming pool with bright colors. A Bigger Splash highlights a bright yellow swimming pool from sewage, while The Sunbather features a receding clean swimming pool. Sometimes behind something that seems glaring and shining lies a dryness or even damage that is silently deadly.
The drought in The Sunbather describes not only the barrenness of the soil that makes the flowers seem to scream for water every minute but also the drained feeling inside. Fatigue crept into my heart as I saw the guy in The Sunbather who stood staring at one of his knees. He might have been trying to endure the drought for too long, so all he wanted was to immerse himself for a while, even though the pool water was only enough to soak his feet. Even though it talks about drought, The Sunbather gives us a breath of coolness because we feel understood and represented by Ilham Karim.
