ARYO TOH DJOJO

In the mid-1980s, Hollywood was running full tilt. A veritable dream factory, it fuelled the imaginations of the entire world with its detailed images and elaborations of alien encounters, sentient murderous cyborgs, and assorted supernatural occurrences. Perhaps not coincidentally, Aryo Toh Djojo was born and raised within this popcultural primordial soup, bombarded from a formative age by movies, celebrity culture, ads, television shows, music videos, skateboarding, and oh so much more.

A self-described “ufologist”—someone who is interested in whether UFOs are linked to the existence of extraterrestrial beings—Toh Djojo’s body of work is primarily concerned with exploring the visual narratives of his own interests. UFOs, out of body experiences, and alien abductions are all depicted within his immersive and succeedingly cinematic canvases that feel much a product of the environment in which he was raised. Toh Djojo’s chosen painting method, the airbrush, recalls long-held subcultural connections. Beloved by fantasy and science fiction illustrators and artists, within car culture, and as a retouching technique—altering realities—before “photoshopping” became a common verb.

All this to say, the artifice of the medium and the feeling of its impact is the point. Big vistas—cityscapes, deserts—foregrounded with centrally focused characters ascending to the heavens, or spacecraft hovering above, recall key moments of peak Hollywood-esque visual magic. While engaged with pop and pulp, the impressive craft of the work (unlike the abductees) remains grounded in art history. The hazy effect of Toh Djojo’s freehanded airbrush technique recalls the diffused visuals seen, say, in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, while also utilising a sfumato effect that extends back to the early renaissance. This blurring of lines—where forms emerge and dissolve without borders or hard edges—engages with art history and relates to other contemporary painters such as Gerhard Richter, Michaël Borremans, and Luc Tuymans, who deliberately soften focus within their figurative work.

Conceptually speaking, elements of Toh Djojo’s work put him squarely within a high-low Southern Californian tradition. In a new series of work, arbitrary texts plucked from advertisements, cinema, and social media are invisibly painted over his imagery and activated using blacklight. This sense of visual poetry, shifting meaning and play recalls the work of Ed Ruscha, while the blacklight draws a connection to popular artworks found in headshops throughout the Golden State. Seriality—Toh Djojo returns to his own sources with regularity—calls to mind John Baldessari, whose own pop-cultural matrixes are a visual representation of a Californian state of mind.

Alongside paintings, the exhibition also features an extension within Toh Djojo’s oeuvre: experimental sound works merging drone, field recordings, musique concrète and electronic soundscapes. Drawing inspiration from diverse threads such as John Cage, Sun Ra, Pauline Oliveros, Christian Marclay and Transcendental Jazz greats John and Alice Coltrane, Toh Djojo channels cosmic frequencies throughout. These transmissions run deep through Leap into the Void, as we witness an artist reaching towards his own mothership, blurring the lines and thinking beyond the boundaries of our world.

—James Casey

Courtesy Perrotin