At ara contemporary, Condro Priyoaji’s fourth solo exhibition, The Stillness of Becoming is one of the closing programmes of 2025, features a series of monochromatic paintings as a continuation of his exploration on how visual reality is merely a reflection of light upon its surrounding objects. The gallery looks narrower as regular visitors might recall, and the row of ankle-tall windows where the sun could timidly enter the exhibition space is now enclosed as partitions are made temporary within the gallery, separating each monochromatic artwork into alleys and allowing the viewers to actually look at them closely, almost but not entirely isolated from one another.
Given the nature of Proyoaji’s monochromatic work, it risks the audience with the feeling of weariness, and the exhibition set by FFFAAARRR is a reasonable way to allow each artwork to stand out on its own. The flow of the exhibition is still as intuitive as if our sight would voluntarily pause within each alley to look a bit more closely at each of the work. This design composition compliments how the works are being experienced by the audience, as how they describe it, capturing specific frames of moments within a sequential flow. In this context, the exhibition flow tried to grasp the concept of stillness, allowing the audience to see the work in their individual situation and imagining its initial motion in a specific frame.
One of the works that lightly lifts our eyes and gives a momentarily breathing moment is probably Lens #1 (2025), an installation of translucent resin sheet casted by a warm spotlight towards the white wall of the gallery. The work is placed on a chunky black platform heightened around eye-level on a tight alley, making our eyesight somehow narrower, strangely guiding us to immerse in the work in a more focused state. Another work uncannily similar to this one, is placed around the corner before we meet another series of monochromatic work with different angles and placement.
From here, it becomes easier to trace the larger ideas that Priyoaji has been returning to across his practice. As a general audience, we might unthoughtfully map out some points of ideas around Priyoaji’s artistic practice visible in the exhibition: light, dark, movement, stillness, are they not? The exhibition explains the centre of Priyoaji’s practice as transforming one nature into its opposite and that it’s rooted in a paradox on how can becoming contain stillness.
Those ideas are grounded in a process that Priyoaji has refined through a particular set of experimentations. While Priyoaji’s previous series explored the play of light in natural settings, this time he turns to its encounter with man-made elements such as mirrors and rippling water, as he reckons it can distort light and create some kind of motion, and change the way we look at objects and the world around them. His steps include placing a mirror at the bottom of an aquarium filled with clear water and setting the water in motion. He directed light to the mirror, and it began creating rippling shadows that appeared on the surface. This method allows Priyoaji to convert the bent light into his canvases in monochrome colours, examining how water, although looks still, distorts lights in ways that give it shape and meaning.
What is it about lights and rippling waters?
The exhibition keeps natural light almost entirely outside its frame, however it would’ve been fascinating to see some work that employs the play of natural light penetrate the gallery through its existing windows and create its own time-bound light and dark entanglement within the space. Although this time the experimentation still does the work interestingly, it leaves room for imagining a further leap in medium and artistic approach.
ara contemporary
The Stillness of Becoming
Condro Priyoaji
15 November – 21 December 2025
ara contemporary
Jalan Tulodong Bawah I no 16
Jakarta Selatan
Jakarta 12190, Indonesia
