| Despite all of the success from cityscape paintings, Pupuk also paints various objects and themes, such as human figures, human faces and still-life. However, his face and human figures paintings are not well appreciated by the art market.
This situation doesn’t discourage him to draw human faces; instead, he sees it as a challenge and an encouragement to keep on experimenting and searching for better face series that can become as famous and as well-appreciated as his cityscape series paintings.
It was a year ago when I visited Pupuk’s studio together with dr. Oei Hong Djien; we saw two new paintings of human faces that stroke our attention. They were so wild in expression executed in the typical Pupuk’s ornamental strong brush stroke, yet it revealed a very different feeling with the usual Pupuk’s face painting. To me, it felt more contemporary. It instantly reminded me of Chuck Clouse, yet still brought the best touch of Pupuk D.P. At that very moment, I spontaneously asked Pupuk to do an exhibition on his new face series paintings.
That story was not the end of my surprise. About one or two months later, I came to his studio, he showed me his new painting of Naomi Campbell facial expression, executed in realists technique with a layer of gold colour paint splash. I was speechless being face to face with the overwhelming artistic beauty, and my only comment was ”wow”. That was the most surprising side of Pupuk I’ve ever seen since I first knew him10 years ago.
Personally, I see Pupuk as an artist with many surprises. With his true commitment and focus on his artistic excellence, his surprises are getting even better from time to time, especially when he showed me his experiments on the face sculptor.
Pupuk is really a true artist, who only thinks about his artistic works, as if nothing else matter. He is an artist who dares to move ahead from his success to pursue his artistic ambition. This exhibition is a statement of his artistic journey into the next level.
September, 2008
Hermanto Soerjanto |
