Pāṭha

What happens when the artist questions not only his role in society, but the very categories of “masculine” and “feminine” handed to him? These questions materialize as embodied negotiations, performed through the recent passing of his mother and his persistent attraction to the feminine that permeates his world. Rhomadioni occupies an ambivalent position, a space of productive ambiguity. He calls this departure Pustaka Wanita: Pātha—an archive of feminine curiosity, an ongoing effort to understand what lies beyond the totalizing masculine.

The allure of the feminine, its mystery, its emotional depth, its refusal to be fully captured, became the gravitational center of his practice. His works are filled with forms culturally coded as feminine: breasts, curves, uterus, rendered with precision or deformed into abstraction, placed in surrealscapes. He approaches these forms as a reader, not a conqueror. By moving from realist depiction to the fragmented and surreal, he moves from a conception of the “feminine” as fixed essence toward a territory where grief, curiosity, and artistic form are shared across bodies and traditions. Rhomadioni's work does not resolve these tensions, it inhabits them. And in that inhabitation, he finds a deeper way of asking.

Putu Sridiniari