Mondo at Biasa Artspace: This Ain’t No Party, This Ain’t No Wonderland
Nice party. Beautiful people. Harrowing canvasses. Clearly, this ain’t no fooling around, even if it did take place in Bali, the ultimate island for fooling around, art-wise and otherwise. But a wonderland, Bali is not. A rabbit hole to wonderland, this exhibition is not. We are at Biasa Artspace, Bali’s pre-eminent, credibly independent, contemporary art gallery. November 21. It’s a vernissage for the disturbingly beautiful and beautifully disturbing recent oeuvre of Bali-based painter Edmondo Zanolini (AKA Mondo), entitled “Follow the Rabbit”.
Shades of Lewis Carrolls’s rabbit? Perhaps. But this is no recreational trip into a whimsically altered state, it is a harrowing one into a raw state of naked awareness, and certainly not a wonderland by any stretch of any addled imagination. It is more Helter-Skelter than Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Stop dreaming, says Mondo. Wonderland and the House of Horrors are one and the same. Drop the dreams and wake up. The antidote to dreams is down this rabbit hole, so follow the rabbit, if you dare. Reality is weirder than dreams ever could be.
Tommy Soeharto Scores Ten Stories: What’s With That, Really?
This image comes from the website of the Pecatu Indah development which has engulfed Dreamland beach and everything around it in the Bukit Jimbaran area of south Bali. The endearing little erection here depicted, called modestly “The Terrace,” will reach to ten stories. Count ‘em. Plus those “Rapunzel-Does-Denpasar” appendages on top, which ostensibly give this generic tenement block its Balinese character. The whole Pecatu Indah mega-development of which this is a part, has been captained since the beginning by none other than Tommy the Wild Child of Indonesia’s late, long-reigning despot, Soeharto.
Oh, just incidentally and not worth mentioning at all, Tommy was actually convicted of the gang-style murder of a high court judge in broad daylight a few years back, and managed to mitigate his sentence to nearly nothing, if he ever served a minute of it. Pundits proclaim that he paid a “stunt double” lookalike to sit in his posh executive cell while he gallivanted around the world, and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it were true. OK, nevermind, so here we have Tommy erecting edifices on a grand scale in Bali, an island already starved of electricity, water and necessary space to revv all its motorbikes, not to mention the Range Rovers, Hummers and Ferrari Testarossas. So Tommy scores ten stories plus.