Javanese Woman at Night before City, 2000, oil on canvas, 83 x 144 cm.
Cubist Saté Seller (saté refers to small pieces of meat roasted on a skewer), 1998, oil on canvas, 84 x 74 cm.Zulian Rivani belongs to a small group of Indonesian artists from Kalimantan (Borneo). Kalimantan is the third largest island in the world. Indonesians share the island with Malaysia and with the Sultanate of Brunei in the north and northwest. The vast jungle areas of Kalimantan (80% of the territory is jungle) are still almost untouched by Westerners. More than 200 different tribes live throughout Borneo, collectively known as Dayak. Traditionally, Dayaks lived upriver as hunters and gatherers. More recently, they have turned into rice growers. Their traditional religion is animistic, although Christianity has made inroads more recently. Their crafts are intricate and colorful. Dayaks are especially well-known for tattooing, basket-weaving, metalworks, sculptures and multi-colored ikat-cloth.
Zulian Rivani was born in Banjarmasin, South Kalimantan, in 1967. He went to Java in his early 20's and studied at the Indonesian Art Institute in Yogyakarta. He worked together with the Indonesian artist Bonny Setiawan. Rivani had numerous exhibitions in Indonesia and Singapore. The outstanding trademark of his paintings are the bright colors. He shows a preference for primary and secondary colors in various keys. The brightness of his works is relieved by integrated black or white shapes.Javanese Woman at Night before City (2000) could be seen as a reply to Bonny Setiawan’s Girl with Fanta (1999). Both paintings show a young Indonesian woman confronted with a modern nightly city scene. While Setiawan’s girl appears illuminated and appears to move towards the viewer, away from the dark mysterious cityscape that lies behind her, Rivani’s young woman is an integral part of the abstract composition. Her coloring is similar to her surroundings. The nightly houses are colorful and flat. The trees and bushes have turned into geometricized decorative patterns. Rivani emphasizes two-dimensional flatness, while Setiawan plays with illusionary space.
In his earlier work Cubist Saté Seller (1998), Zulian Rivani combines a formal Cubist approach with his own palette of intense colors. The fractured and reassembled scene that shows a city scape with houses and a street vendor who sells skewers with roasted meat is augmented with three animals at the bottom of the painting. The chicken, the goat and the turtle figures are emblematic of what is to be found on the skewers.
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