In Between Stillness: Wedhar Riyadi and the Poetry of the Everyday

Wedhar Riyadi’s latest series, Tabletop Diaries, celebrates aspects of daily life that often go unnoticed. The series emerged from the artist’s quiet observations during the isolation of the pandemic. In these works, he paints arrangements of inanimate domestic objects, echoing the long tradition of still-life painting. Yet, the objects he depicts are not real, but clay replicas.

These replicas are not intended to be exact imitations. Instead, Wedhar strips away details such as color, labels, and characteristics, reducing them to a raw monochrome. From this silence and emptiness, meaning begins to emerge—reflected through the viewer’s encounter with the objects, resonating with the spiritual principle that meaning arises out of stillness and void.

Tabletop Diaries continues Wedhar’s ongoing exploration of the encounter between two opposing contexts within a single composition: the natural and the artificial. In his previous works, he painted portraits adorned with elements of comical characters. Meanwhile, in the tradition of still life, the transience of human existence is revealed through fragile and fleeting objects—bitten fruit, wilting flowers, or carefully arranged man-made items. Similarly, in Wedhar’s paintings, traces of human presence linger on the surfaces of clay forms—pinched, scratched, stained, and marked—accumulating as layers of history. Clay, or earth itself, has long been understood as a symbol of both the origin and the end of life.

Vivid backgrounds and striking artificial lighting add another layer of tension to the works. The coexistence of the natural and the synthetic within the same frame prompts viewers to reflect: do we instinctively favor what is natural over what is man-made, or perhaps the reverse?

The exhibition In Between Stillness remains open to the public until September 14, 2025, at ara contemporary, South Jakarta.