"stupid history" Drawing

ARTIST STATEMENT Widodo Kabutdo is a visual artist whose practice traverses multiple media, including painting, installation, performance, and site-based works. His artistic approach emerges from a re-reading of lived experience, reflected through the relationships between the human body, nature, and materiality within contemporary life. Since the early 2000s, his interest in drawing practices and environmental issues has shaped a visual sensibility that remains consistent to this day. Beginning in 2005, found plastic became a central axis of his artistic practice. Plastic is not treated as a moral symbol or an instrument of environmental advocacy, but rather as a marker of its time—a manufactured material that carries traces of consumption, human circulation, and artificial ecological systems that endure beyond the human body. The process of collecting materials is an integral part of his practice. Used plastics, with their folds, tears, stains, and varying degrees of transparency, are treated as surfaces that have already “spoken” prior to artistic intervention. Widodo applies minimal intervention, allowing the material’s inherent characteristics to play an active role in the formation of imagery. Human figures, bodily fragments, and forms drawn from nature emerge through a visual language that is restrained, fragile, and often incomplete. Marks made with ink and paint are not intended to cover the surface, but to negotiate with it. Imperfection is positioned as a shared condition between the human body and discarded material. Although found plastic remains at the core of his practice, Widodo does not confine himself to a single medium. Canvas and paper function as symbolic spaces in which the same visual language is translated and tested. Shifts between media are understood as visual and conceptual necessities rather than changes in artistic position. Through this practice, Widodo creates contemplative spaces that reflect on the relationship between humans and the materials they produce—an ecological landscape that continues to accumulate both physically and psychologically, while simultaneously opening new possibilities of meaning within materials often regarded as finished or devoid of value