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Fitrajaya Nusananta, an artist who has been traveling across the continents for years, reveals his spirit through his paintings. He builds up his masterpieces with slices of color and texture nuances, combined with romantic figures, thus expressing images from his mind. Longing and romanticism are mirrored in his color play and soft figurative expressionism. His images are however rooted in real life, such as his paintings that are inspired on his one-year stay in the nineties with a traditional Papuan community living in the Bird's Head in the easternmost outskirts of Indonesia. This shows us that this artist is a child of our nation who still has an eye for our society and culture. Fitrajaya: "from my experiences in Papua I learned to understand what life and people are all about, and these principles of life can be encountered throughout the world. They are universal. I use these universal themes in my work".
Another principle that characterizes Fitrajaya's work is that he seeks the dialogue between the audience and the images he presents. "To me looking at art is not just appreciating a nice painting or sculpture, I want to trigger the interaction between the audience, art and society. This can result in many alternative interpretations. What is important is that the painting appeals to the imagination and appreciation of the audience, and stimulates their consciousness. Through such interaction art can be truly dynamic and contribute to our lives".

Fitrajaya Nusananta represents a new generation of artists that wish to make a social statement, sometimes by unveiling the hidden and dark sides of mankind, sometimes by delicately portraying a sense of love and belonging. He shows that esthetic value and message can go very well together. His experiences in various European countries further shaped this strong urge to communicate through art and to make his art truly communicative and borderless by portraying human psychology.

With oil paint, structure, and sometimes acrylic, Fitrajaya constructs in each painting a microcosm of emotions, relations, and interactions. These cosmos are populated by human and supernatural beings, side by side with animals and artifacts that stress the emotions that he wants to show to his audience. His line play and use of colors support the story that is told, sometimes aggressively, sometimes as markers of invisible borders. In many cases a story, or elements of this story, continues in different paintings, this way showing the ongoing dynamics of action and interaction. People evolve, have many facets and colors. Each single painting surprises when contemplated again; the more you look at them, the more nuances and dimensions will come to the fore. Fitrajaya's paintings can be narrated as a poem. At some occasions Fitrajaya's work has been exposed in combination with his poems, or with poems by other authors that were inspired by his work. This unique co-operation is but one expression of the hybrid character of his work: it is co-constructed by artist and audience.

Dr. D. van Oosterhout

Curator, the Netherlands