REMEMBERING IS FORGETTING

"I asked Douglas whether his practice of painting is remembering or forgetting. He answered both, after taking a long pause. I perceive that Douglas’ process of meditation is an attempt to capture memories, which lead him to find the core of his idea. This idea will bear the power to concretize his artistic practices. After he writes down the idea using pencil and charcoal, he begins to pour a can of paint along one side of the canvas spread out on the floor. Using a stick of wood or a squeegee, he draws the spilled paint in the same manner Japanese people mop their floors. Solid forms then appear at the base and blurred at the edges. We could see the act of ‘remembering’, concretizing the memories in this action. However, we will immediately realize that this action, simultaneously covers the sentence that he wrote before. We could call this act ‘forgetting’. Forgetting could also be referred to as ‘accidental’ since we simply cannot remember everything. The same can be seen in Douglas’ strokes, solid in the beginning and increasingly blurred at the end, leaving thin scratches and subtle coloured dots."

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Curator Chabib Duta

D Gallerie, Jakarta Indonesia

March 2020