Domestic Intimacy in View Finder, Davy Linggar’s Solo Exhibition
Davy Linggar returns with his second solo exhibition with ROH. View Finder is a series of paintings surrounding an architectural installation designed by renowned architect Andra Matin. In this solo exhibition, Davy Linggar highlights his daily life filled with painting as a form of homage to the domestic issue, both as a pattern and context of production—an antidote to the industrial routine of aesthetic labor.
Born in Jakarta in 1974, Davy Linggar pursued painting studies in Bandung and Germany, which he eventually left behind to immerse himself in lens-based image creation, which he studied autodidactically. His travels in Europe brought him closer to videography. Since then, Davy Linggar has become a prominent creative figure in Jakarta, with a body of work spanning fashion, music, advertising, architecture, and stage design. His practice, which is born out of instinct, continues to evolve as a result of diverse forms, processes, and cross-system collaborations.
These experiences and achievements taught Davy Linggar about the industrial and commercial potential of photography as a medium—while painting, on the other hand, remains a space of pure freedom for him, untouched by professional frameworks and emerging from domestic intimacy. A corner of his family room at home is the only place where he paints—amid his life with his wife and their two children, whose presence and creative input often leave their mark on his work. These spatial-psychosocial contexts take form in the exhibition at ROH, inspiring architect Andra Matin to design a structure that abstracts Linggar’s family home. Through this design, the exhibition invites visitors to step out of the familiar white-cube gallery space into a speculative wooden architecture that resembles a dream. This idea encourages us to rethink how paintings should be created, but also how and where paintings should be experienced. Davy Linggar presents a pure notion that paintings, at their core, are an everyday object intimately tied to our lives.
The Following Mother Nature #1-12 series, a collection of Davy Linggar’s paintings, is a variation of a single photograph he took himself. This series depicts a pair of intertwined hands. The close-up view of this image immediately isolates and emphasizes the hands’ ability to express emotion. It remains unclear whether these hands belong to one person or if they are the clasped hands of two individuals; viewers are free to interpret. Davy Linggar’s work often features parts of the body, such as hands and feet, as a way to show how the body can convey meaning without the need to display a face.
As we all know, photography is ever-present in Davy Linggar’s work, both in the process and concept behind it. The title View Finder itself is derived from a photographic term, following a theme that also appeared in his previous exhibitions such as iso (2020) and Aperture (2022). The repetition of patterns in several paintings reminds us of the commercial world of image-making, where many images are often taken in a short time, but only one is chosen for use. Although painting tends to take more time than commercial image production, Davy Linggar uses repetition in his work to create a similar effect. By observing the patterns that are continuously reproduced on his canvases, we are invited to reflect on how technological advancements in photography and mass reproduction have changed the way we see and understand images. In Linggar’s hands, painting becomes not only a tool for reproducing images but also a way to explore how these images imprint on our memory and psychology, both personally and collectively. Instead of diminishing the impact, repetition deepens our experience of the artwork. View Finder is open to the public until October 27, 2024, at ROH, Central Jakarta.
Copyright belongs to The Artist
Text by Jeppe Ugelvig and Denise Lai
Photography by Davy Linggar
With support from studio andramatin
Courtesy of The Artist and ROH
