As a truly seminal artist from Southeast Asia, Affandi is celebrated as a keen onlooker of the natural world, one who was wholly dedicated to the pursuit of unrestrained expression and emotive authenticity within his works. Having grown up in a Javanese coastal town, Affandi spent the majority of his childhood infatuated with the open seascapes of the fishing village which he lived in, which ignited within him a penchant for portraying the everyday lives of Indonesian people and its beauty. In the 1950s, Yogyakarta was a mecca for Indonesia’s modern art community, attracting a wide range of personalities and visionaries, with Affandi being one of them. In contrast to the mooi indie artists who romanticized the landscapes of Indonesia through the lens of realism and formal composition, Affandi forwent verisimilitude in favor of subjective and emotional representations of his daily surroundings. In establishing the organization Lembaga Pelukis Rakyat (The People’s Painters Association), Affandi encouraged his fellow Indonesian artists to strive for authenticity – rather than rehearsed reverence, in their depictions of Indonesian culture. A naturalist at heart, Affandi was renowned for his ability to cast off any social ideologies that could affect his choice of subject and style, and worked tirelessly to develop an expressive and inimitable visual language that would eventually herald him as one of the most significant Indonesian artists of the 20^th century.

            Stylistically distinguishable, Boats is an energetic piece from the artist’s idiosyncratic opus. Affandi’s signature use of bold, colored lines delineate the canvas with chaotic harmony, as energetic swaths of impasto reveal thinner, finer streaks that touch and intertwine to generate a sense of organic movement and flow throughout the image. Dynamic and intense, Affandi lends from a wide spectrum of vibrant colors to portray the liveliness of the seascape; this clashing of hues hallmarks Affandi’s boundless freedom of style, as he melds the elements of sky, sea and land together with spontaneous streaks of white overtones, blues, reds, greens and yellows. With just his fingers, wrists and palms, Affandi squeezes paint directly onto the canvas and manipulates the undulating bands of color to form tactile, three dimensional impastos, lending the work flashing moments of intensity and movement. Affandi’s eclectic yet deliberate use of texture allows him to channel his immense energy and emotion to the scenery, as he re-imagines the vibrant colors and ever-changing seascapes of his bucolic childhood, endowing this present lot with personal tokens of symbolism. At a time when Indonesia was taking its first pivotal steps into an era of modernism, Affandi turned to the medium of paint to commemorate the richness of Indonesia, capturing moments in time that moved him profoundly. Affandi’s painstaking dedication to expressionism is ubiquitous in his expansive oeuvre, and Boats is a stunning illustration of the spiritual mores and transcendental sceneries of Indonesia.