There’s been barely a squeak from Hamidi Hadi in the last few years, but this month’s solo exhibition sees the artist make a comeback with his signature explorations of form and material. His works in ‘Antara’ are distinctive of his style, but they weren’t always this way. He started out with abstract images that hid ghostly outlines of figures, and over time, these spectres were slowly extinguished for non-representational images like the ones you’ll see at his solo exhibition this month.
All the works in the show herald that Modernist mantra of form, fabulous form, a genre you won’t see so much of these days as figurative works are currently hogging the spotlight. So, relish the artist’s blob-like shapes in works like ‘Tertakung I’ and ‘Wait and she will come eventually!’.
It’s in one particular work, however, that you’ll find abstraction and the artist’s adroitness resonating with full force, ‘Just let it be, you can’t stop him!’ – a huge work that combines enamel paint a staple in Jackson Pollock’s studio back in the day), polyurethane (Google it) and acrylic paint. The materials seem to have exploded on the canvas, and the mixture of glossy silver and sanguine red will remind you of the type of carnage seen in gory films or futuristic graphic novels; it’s as if this very painting was used as a backdrop in an explosive round of target practice. It’s the least tranquil in all of Hamidi’s works in ‘Antara’, and without a doubt, the most charged too. Rachel Jena