Bestrizal Besta

Biography

Portrait of Bestrizal Besta

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His works display a mastery of charcoal as a medium, used in a remarkable scale on canvas, with a symbolic, haunting, joyful, mysterious subject matter that can lead to many discoveries.

Catalogue: Besta Bestrizal

Besta Bestrizal is an Indonesian artist working mainly with the painting. His works revol-ve around the themes of humanity, science and art. Bestrizal’s photo-realist approach is grounded in photography where he constructs scenarios that are then processed as digital images that are later manipulated and embellished with elements that enable the artist to further present his moral and personal message.

His works display a mastery of charcoal as a medium, used in a remarkable scale on canvas, with a symbolic, haunting, joyful, mysterious subject matter that can lead to many discoveries.
In some of his paintings, Bestrizal uses splashes of colour coming from flora and fauna: ‘This is an applied metaphor in which I address our contrasting relationship with na- ture. We are all different, and with our differences, we co-exist interdependently in equilibrium’, the artist explains.

“ [...] The charcoal works of Indonesian artist Bestrizal Besta form a series of landscapes where nature, people, and objects come into contention with one another in monochromatic black and white. These landscapes seem to invite us into a detailed world a la “Alice in Wonder- land” or Hieronymus Bosch’s surreal hybrid worlds—only more scorched, as though they have just endured inferno. Besta describes various shapes, different kinds of animals and plants from macro-organisms to minuscule creatures, different kinds of objects, human body parts, and so forth. He layers elements, stacks and piles them one on top of the other, making them jostle for space on his canvas. The subjects in Besta’s works as shown at this solo exhibition mainly imply a relationship between people and nature, depicting an array of plants, animals, and sundry objects. He reveals how each artwork began from small things; and though small, they carry with them an energy that can propel others through a constellation of minute elements reminiscent of microorganisms that exist intertwined with our lived realities. [...]”.

essay by Rifky Effendy

written on the occasion of the exhibition

Bestrizal Besta. Seeing The Unseen

at Primae Noctis Art Gallery, Lugano, February 2020

Exhibitions