First published: September 2025
In Fika Leon’s paintings, toothy figures dance and careen over a Pop palette backdrop layered with the legend, ritual and socio-cultural past of Indonesia
Fika Leon’s real name is Fika Arestya Sultan. The
“Leon” is an homage to his eponymous son, whom
the artist credits as the impetus behind his painting
practice. Fika Leon lives and works in Yogyakarta, a city
in the south-central area of the Indonesian island of Java.
Recently exhibited in international venues including in
Miami, Los Angeles and Dubai, his art often depicts
crazed, mask-bedaubed, shadowy creatures, wrapped
in a dance-like cast, painted with expressive impasto
skeins and strokes. He uses acrylic, enamel and silicone
paint, layering varicoloured strips. To the Western eye, the
work, with its centred, beaming or howling faces created
in animated crimson, azure and hoary-white overlaid
brushstrokes, may be redolent of US artist Jean-Michel
Basquiat’s frenetic, neo-Expressionist dashes and daubs
of the 1980s. In fact, Leon and other Indonesian artists of
his generation are foregrounded by the complex legacy
of nationalistic Modernist artist groups that formed
during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia from 1942
to 1945.
King, 2020, 53 x 53 in. / 134.5 x 134.5 cm
This legacy is compounded by related groups like the Painters Front of 1945, and its successor, the
Gelanggang group, which depicted the fierce, protracted
battles around the West Javanese capital city Bandung at
the time. At first glance, this historical back-drop may
seem tangential to Leon’s work, characterised as the latter
is by fantastical portraits of frenzied, toothy figures. But
these antecedent Bandung painters paved the way for
the vernacular that artists like Leon have adopted, one
that takes the prismatic Western neo-Pop palette but
also makes appropriative use of traditional motifs.
Self-Portrait #3, 2022, 31.5 x 39 in. / 80 x 99 cm
Leon was born in 1983 in the city of Madium, East Java. His parents, now retired, were civil servants for the government, and Leon had a standard, middle-class education. After school, he worked in graphic design but soon got dissatisfied and, in his twenties, spurred by an intuitive will-to-paint, began visiting local galleries, thus starting his autodidactic art education. He began painting about ten years ago and, when the Covid pandemic hit, he quit his office job and turned to the canvas with resolute dedication, first working at home then in a small studio, where he still paints every day for hours on end.
Selfie of the artist with a work in progress, 2023
By EKIN ERKAN
This is an article extract; read the full article in Raw Vision #124.
