Every Solid Thing Leaves a Trace

That we are "drowning in an ocean of images" seems an exceedingly cheap expression for our times. Images easily and swiftly migrate over from our phones, via early digital cameras that are currently trendy, pictures kept from curiosities through search engines or digital inspirations fill the pockets of our memory that are always full. Though crowded, every once in a while we are still mesmerised with small fragments that cast a wide net about our existence from those images. They might be the sight of one of our mutual friends at a scene, often small bit of the past that pushes itself towards our consciousness. Old images, not-so-photogenic photographs, pictures that were taken without much consideration, the subject of which is a little out of focus: these are vernacular records, the availableness of our lives. Galih chose to paint these kinds of photograph for "Every Solid Thing Leaves A Trace". They are as if apparitions, thin images redrawn from film negatives. Galih kept the negatives painted in their reversed state. As though we have arrived at the very end of a family photo album. Also inverted is the way these oil paintings are created over aluminium plates that are bent and shaped as if they are gessoed canvasses. Without meticulous attention it is easy to fail to grasp how synthetic they as artistic manipulations are. But, being drawn to extreme states, reduced, complicated, assemblaged, partitioned, and transfigured: these images prevail. They prevailed because they come to exist towards our consciousness as quickly as our nerves are triggered, as sensations they grow into particular memories. They came and last precisely because they are reduced into ambiguity and the figures anonymous. They are but mysteries, felt because drawn and left behind. "To be drowning in images", as such, becomes an important expression for our times. It is a feeling of drowning in a subconsious and its undercurrent of sensating imaginations. A subconscious world just as noisy as the conscious. This exhibition functions like an imaginary family album. A fictitious one, because the negatives are sourced from flea markets. Second hand memories cast out, collectively remembered, just barely, by way of their physical format. We know what they are, though who they are–whether or not they really are related to us–becomes not too important. We are instantly transported to an imaginary place and back to our bodies, abridging relations, synthesising memories to be part of our self. Was it utopia? Dystopia? Are we connecting with romantics drawn from our exhaustion of our everyday. That everyday that is burning us out, that makes us want comfortable imaginations, better times from the past, of smooth relations, the better luck remembered? We all are peoples half asleep, with some parts percepting the living present, other parts perpetually imagining things. To be awake and in a dream at the same time, this is the state of deadpan flatness and ambiguity that exist in Galih's images, and this exhibition. A thin membrane separating the day and the dream, towards that other space–a heterotopia–is where art brings us into. Reaching out and grounding us at the same time. For every actuality has a virtuality. Every solid thing leaves a trace.