To fully appreciate the art of Ridho Rizki, one must stand physically in front of his works. Only in person can the monochrome that dominates his canvases dissolve into a myriad of tiny colored dots. As the artist himself told me during an interview for the opening of his exhibition Before Meanings at the Gajah Gallery, his palette is limited to the three primary colors and black. White, on the other hand, is not painted on, but emerges as the background of the canvas where other pigments are absent.
At first glance, his paintings resemble black-and-white film photographs. Photography, after all, is part of his creative process: “I take images from photographs I have shot myself,” Rizki explains. “Not all of them have a symbolic meaning. The choice of subjects follows my emotions and sensations.” From this starting point, his personal technique moves forward by layering the paint with an airbrush: “with low pressure, the paint comes out in splatters and is not too concentrated. This allows me to create different layers of color (…). At this stage, I use stencils to give the images maximum definition.” This meticulous attention to aesthetics drives him to a radical choice: neither signing nor titling the works. “I don’t want to disturb the composition,” he clarifies. “I want the viewer to focus only on the artwork itself and its subject.”
While Rizki’s technique is undoubtedly original, the most fascinating aspect of his research remains the dialogue with Impressionism in painting and with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photographic concept of the “decisive moment.” Even though Rizki shares their tension toward capturing the fleeting instant, his response is diametrically opposed. If, on one hand, the practice of the Impressionists and Cartier-Bresson thrived on long waits—often outdoors—to catch and instantly immortalize that “decisive moment,” Rizki’s works are instead the result of complex studio processing. For his predecessors, the fleeting moment to be captured was atmospheric and subject to the laws of chance; Rizki, instead, brings this process into our subconscious. His goal is to paint the exact instant just before images take on meaning in our brain—a moment no longer governed by weather conditions and chance, but by optical and neurological laws.
From an aesthetic point of view, it is as if Rizki’s works have been “contaminated” by this dialogue with Impressionism and photography, as they carry a highly recognizable tribute to them: the decomposition of color and the resemblance to film photography.
Despite these affinities, the choice of subjects constitutes another point of departure from both movements. The subjects chosen by Rizki for this exhibition are, for the most part, still lives and landscapes characterized by immobility. For example, the subject of the artwork Untitled (JL26A4534), despite being a landscape, is substantially different from what an Impressionist would have chosen. It features no trees or significant structures. It could be a vast expanse of sand—likely a beach—marked by what appear to be tracks left by the wheels of a car or motorcycles. Therefore, it is a landscape highly unlikely to change due to sudden shifts in light or general weather conditions.
Rizki, however, goes further. The subject of Untitled (JN26A27511) could easily have been chosen by an Impressionist. It depicts a field bordered by trees—a view we could readily find in the landscapes of Alfred Sisley. Nevertheless, here it is represented as an immobile subject; even if the actual weather or light were to change, I am quite convinced that Rizki’s representation would remain the same. Since the core of the exhibition is precisely the emergence of images in the human mind, the artist seems to hit a crucial point here: unlike some other animals, humans recognize places regardless of weather or lighting variations. It is as if an archetypal idea of every space exists in our brain—an abstraction independent of changing elements. Rizki paints exactly this idea.
Another remarkable work is Untitled (S26A.54.629), which portrays a city street. In the modulation of the buildings’ volumes, the light-filled street, and especially the receding line of roofs at the top, I seem to recognize a significant tribute to Georgia O’Keeffe. This suggestion could reveal a new key to reading Rizki’s art: just like the American painter, the Indonesian artist also shows a strong preference for floral and organic shapes. We can only wait for his next artistic evolutions to find out. In the meantime, the exhibition Before Meanings offers a rare opportunity: to pause in front of the canvas, challenge our own perception, and rediscover how the human mind, even before the eyes, is the true creator of the images that surround us.
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