Ketut Budiana: Maestro of The Fantastic

When it comes to high art, little attention is today paid in Bali to the type of painting that issues directly from the Hindu-Balinese symbolic world. Abstraction, objective realism, installations and performances are the prevailing hype. Anything that has a stylistic Balinese flavour is deemed passe. Yet, in one of the gangways of Ubud-Padangtegal lives and works a lonely artist who can withstand the comparison with the likes of Fuchs and Odilon Redon: Ketut Budiana, the Balinese "Fantastic" master.

To Ketut Budiana, art is philosophical. His paintings speak of the swirling, churning and whistling of energetic cosmic forces that are at the root of Hindu-Balinese understanding of the world and Man's place in it. Those forces are represented by demonic characters derived from Balinese classical iconography.

Unlike classical paintings though, Ketu Budiana's works do not represent stories such as the Mahabharatta and Ramayana. They illustrate the polar – positive and negative- forces at work both at the level of the Macrocosm (Bhwana Agung) and at that of the microcosm (Bhwana Alit) or human being. The cosmos is in the self, he tells us, and the self has to adapt to the whirling rhythm of the larger cosmos, its long-term aim, after an unknown number of incarnations, being to melt and disappear into the cosmic void through Moksa. And the way to achieve Moksa is for the human being to fulfil his/her swadharma, i.e to perform the ritual and social duties that correspond to his/her incarnated status as a man or woman with specific talents and abilities.

Born in 1950 in Padangtegal, Peliatan, in the Ubud district of the Gianyar regency, he was twenty when tourism began, in the 1970s, its fast and uninterrupted growth. So his life has accompanied all the irresistible changes his island has been subject to. He was born on an island without cars or electricity, ethnically and linguistically homogenous, and where knowledge was mainly transmitted through the magic of a religion-imbued theatre. He grew into adulthood as this same island was becoming richer, yet its culture shrinking under the dual onslaught of the national state—carrying a different language and a different symbolic world—and of Western-inspired modernity. So Ketut Budiana stands as a witness of a changing society, and his art is a distinct, unique attempt at revitalizing old Balinese values and symbols while remaining as close as possible to the original techniques and meanings.

Appreciating Ketut Budiana's painting is accepting the validity or legitimacy of a different kind of aesthetics. The works are made to be appreciated not from a distance, as a visual whole, but rather to be "read" from close up; the space is never open, but usually dark and at times full of coded characters that may seem obscure to the non-Balinese. But once one accepts the legitimacy of such different aesthetics and let the eye roam freely over the surface of the works, then gazes at a patterned detail, visually digging into it, before dancing again on the surface to follow the lines of identification of a drawing, then the "monsters" magically come to life before being taken into a maelstrom of throbbing forms, while the onlooker feels falling upon himself the heavy rhythm of the primal cosmic world.