Unconcerned with rendering his subject with verisimilitude, Hendra Gunawan takes the artistic liberty to paint the body with red, green, blue, pink and orange hues, unifying Affandi with his objects of creation.

Affandi was 75 years old when this portrait was painted in 1982. In the present lot, the mustachioed and bearded painter dons long, white hair.

As a humanist painter who theatrically projected his emotions through his painted subjects, Affandi would first observe the subject he wanted to paint, before suddenly feeling an insatiable urge to render it. He was not the type of artist who created works based on rich imaginations or intangible fantasies. Rather, he needed inducements from objective phenomena outside him.

Given the fact that Affandi holds a tube of paint in the present lot, one can surmise that he is in the middle of painting. The canvas, or the subject he is painting, would be situated right in front of him. Therefore, Affandi’s object of creation or muse takes Hendra Gunawan’s space, and now, the viewer’s space.

“What’s wrong with my look?” - Affandi, 1935

Affandi was not a political artist. He was simply an artist, fixated by the concept of the ‘self’. He incessantly contemplated the relationship between reality and the self, and processed this through his emotive self-portraits, which he produced throughout his life. Intimately aware of every crevasse, contour and expression of his own face as he aged, he was engrossed in the act of looking in the mirror, and confronting the self.

In the present lot, however, Affandi’s ‘self’ is painted through the lens and eye of another.

Affandi holds neither a palette nor a paintbrush. Instead, his assistant was typically seated behind him and tasked with passing the artist tubes of paint when required.

Hendra Gunawan renders Affandi in a stylized manner, capturing the fellow artist in the midst of movement. Affandi’s limbs appear soft and boneless, as his body hangs in mid-air. Enthralled in the act of creation, Affandi appears entranced.

Affandi painted with the spontaneity and zeal akin to that of Action Painting, suggesting that the physical act of painting itself was an essential aspect of the finished product.

Affandi gently holds a tube of paint, already tightly squeezed and oozing with a viscous string of emerald green paint from its nozzle.

Enraptured by the process of painting his work, Affandi squeezed paint directly from the tube and applied it onto canvas, forcefully spreading the wet pigments across the surface with his bare hands, wrists, fingers and palms. This inimitable technique afforded Affandi with the aesthetic liberty otherwise stymied by the paintbrush, ultimately eradicating the physical distance between artist and creation.

The oil paint suspends in space before inevitably dripping onto a surface. Hendra Gunawan utilizes this same green pigment to paint Affandi’s proper left arm, fusing Affandi’s physicality with the paint he uses.

Is Affandi floating within the object of his creation, or within his own consciousness?

A kaleidoscopic array of colors painted with thick, winding strokes motion in the horizonless backdrop. These meandering swathes of paint echo the curving strokes that Affandi usually applies to his own paintings and mimic the sinuous forms of the subject’s stylized arms and legs. The pigments used in this vibrant negative space mirror those used to render Affandi’s body, further dissolving him into his mise en scène.

Affandi painted while sitting cross-legged on the floor, where he was most comfortable. Hendra Gunawan portrays Affandi barefoot, with toes spread out.