ADAM DE BOER

Encounters at the shoreline have birthed our collective history. So much of our global narrative has been wrapped up in complicated feelings between desire and disappointment, curiosity and apprehension, comfort and fear that have been mutually experienced by those peering out to sea from the shore and those looking towards the beach over miles of water. A contestation of one’s perspective, littorally, not literally. Through this exhibition, Adam takes up the challenge of bringing up difficult conversations about globalized existence and identity by using the sea as a mnemonic for the discourse.

‘Littoral’ (an indefinite border between the land and sea) encompasses Adam’s current body of work that presents an aggregate of coastal images distinct in scale, palette, and narrative. Despite the title being homophonic to the word ‘literal’, the works in Littoral Images need to be read contextually so that the seemingly disparate vistas become a cohesive tale interwoven through their associations with the sea.

The necessity for non-literal reading of the artworks is in line with Adam’s cultural background. As a diasporic individual, Adam’s knowledge of the region and its history comes often from research rather than direct and lived observation. Because of the cultural distance Adam has gone through, his method of footnoting and referencing leaves an apparent trace in this exhibition in the way that the paintings routinely cross-reference each other. Some of the paintings in this exhibition provide context to another artwork, while some parallel each other as conceptual antitheses. More than just internal conversation within the artworks in the show, Adam also dedicates and references other traveller-artists in his work – Annah the Javanese (After Gauguin), Studio Window at Teluk Gerupuk (After Spilliaert), Littoral Images, for A.B. (After Elms), paintings that are an homage to those whom he knows personally as his contemporaries as well as those that came before him. Further than just the visual arts, Adam also references literature pieces such as Anthony Burgess’s 1964 trilogy The Long Day Wanes, Karen Tei Yamashita’s 1997 novel Tropic of Orange, and cultural artifacts such as the cordiform projection map and the Fool’s Cap map.

The indefinite nature of the ‘Littoral’ zone can also be interpreted as representing Adam’s in-between cultural identity as an Indo-Dutch-American, which Adam has explored in the past decade by incorporating traditional Javanese craft as a medium. The pieces in this series are created with the batik colet technique that imbues a pictorial quality and puzzle-like image-making logic to the artworks. In this aspect, the word ‘Littoral’ then also encompasses the tension between the inherent cultural aesthetic of the wax-resist batik painting techniques and the urban subject matter in his paintings.

Lastly, just as crucial as the in-depth cultural research and technical virtuosity that the artist has, Adam’s love for surfing and frequent encounters with the sea have endowed him with a keen sensitivity to depict bodies of water both naturalistically and metaphorically, making Littoral Images a one-of-a-kind show made especially for this opportunity in Jakarta.