Artists

What happens when a painting leaves the wall and becomes a space in itself? Elia Menang Setiadi (he/him) sees painting as an open-ended process. Gestures, words, sounds, colours and textures from everyday life flow into his work, where they are layered, transformed and interwoven anew. Nothing remains fixed: forms emerge, dissolve and reappear elsewhere.

For Jungkunst, Elia developed a spatial installation comprising several paintings. Like a folding screen, it cuts through the exhibition space, opening up and shifting lines of sight, and making painting a physical experience. The paintings step out of their usual positions into a direct dialogue with one another, with the industrial hall, and with us in the space. Between watching and passing on, pausing and moving, a rhythm of its own emerges. The installation becomes a permeable structure in which painting, space, perception and language intertwine. What initially appears as a fragment soon becomes part of a larger context.

How do your paintings develop?
By following an impulse, an interest, a taste—and from there, opening several doors into different spaces. I enter these spaces, take some of their contents with me, scatter them, mix them together, and allow them to transform into new forms. I make them visible, only to dissolve them again. It is a kind of game, allowing different melodies to emerge from shapes and colours, which gradually become my language. I see my work as a space of poems that fly around; some becoming briefly visible before vanishing again, transforming into something new and different.

Can painting in a space open up possibilities that a painting on the wall might not?
I like to let the form of the painting transform and to set something against what is familiar. I often paint on the floor, moving around among my works, and I am drawn to this grounding quality, which I want to convey. Stepping into the space opens up the possibility of experiencing painting as sculpture and as an object. Painting suddenly becomes something one can walk around and through. It defines the space and shapes one’s orientation within it, becoming a body with a physical presence.