In Between Stillness

Wedhar Riyadi's latest series, Tabletop Diaries, celebrates the overlooked and mundane aspects of human life, emerging from his quiet observations during the isolation of the pandemic. Riyadi painted arrangements of inanimate domestic objects, echoing the tradition of still life paintings, but the objects he depicted were clay replicas. These reproductions are not intended to replicate; they are reduced to monochrome without any labels or characteristics, allowing the objects to reveal their meanings through the viewer by reflecting the spiritual principle that meaning arises in silence and emptiness.

Tabletop Diaries continues Riyadi's ongoing exploration of opposing contexts within a single composition, the natural and artificial, where, in his previous works, he painted portraits adorned with elements of comical characters. Traditionally, still-life paintings reveal the impermanence of human existence through the ephemerality of objects such as bitten fruit, wilting flowers, and man-made arrangements. Similarly, in Riyadi's works, the trace of human presence is felt in the pinched surfaces of the clay forms. The traces of touch, wear, stains, scratches, and patina become layers of history, markers that these objects once lived. Clay, or soil, in this case, has long symbolized both the creation and the end of life.

The blinding vibrancy of the backgrounds and lighting introduces a sense of artificiality. This tension between the natural and the synthetic, coexisting within the same composition, invites us to consider whether we instinctively privilege the natural over the man-made, or perhaps the reverse.