Compared with Dono’s usual solid colors and brawny kinetic assemblies, his print- and paper-works at STPI are, by virtue of the medium, more ethereal and intimate. Many of these are mounted dye-work “paintings,” where Dono “drew” on canvas with gum arabic and then dyed and rinsed the material using a technique similar to traditional Javanese batik, generating washes of color in tints more profound than on-surface painting. By adding hand-painted detail over his paste-resist images, Dono’s canvases become barely contained derangements. The following are the familiar pastiches that circulate throughout Dono’s practice: delirious Semar as provocateur, along with tiny creatures who peer from within lascivious red lips; heart-chakra windows that open on demented, riotous scenes; flatulent, Semar-Batman-Superman heroes who brandish phallic pistols and flaming karaoke mics. In tangled works like The Clown Who Lives in Macro Cosmos, Dono’s rhythmic swathes of color and constellations of symbols echo the more phantasmal efforts of Joan Miró.

In his works, beyond a focus on the personal (despite having come of age during Indonesia’s political and military upheavals of the 1960s, which drive the intrinsic syntax of his work), Dono curates the cultural memory of Java itself, within a contemporary context. And, like Semar, Dono spices Indonesian myth with acerbic jabs at his country’s history, past and present, via cultural and sociopolitical cues not easily read outside its borders—yet his vivid, recurring symbolism foists meaningful cadences upon the viewer to evoke a broader engagement. The installation Ronggowarsito Perspective is a sibylline head made of papier-mâché (garnished with a mocking serpent that sprouts from its forehead), tucked inside a Perspex cube painted with texty scribbles. The enigmatic work alludes, we are told, to a 19th-century Javanese poet and reputed prophet, whose writings rejected the hegemony of colonialism and predicted an “age of madness.” In an adjoining gallery, two paper-based “kinetic prints,” both titled Papat Kiblat Lima Pancer, depict four-legged sculptural beings, each “flown” by a single revolving pilot-head and recalling the Javanese belief of there being a multi-faceted consciousness within each individual. While Dono’s referential titles and literary and philosophical imagery spark confusion and fascination, his repetitive iterations of symbolic angels (freedom), flames (chi) and guns and disembodied limbs (violence), for example, gradually shed explicit meaning and become more expressive. His weird, comic-ethno-pop hybrid creatures tend to morph into objects of power with attitude, including Badman Who Wears the Batman Costume, as well as flame-breathing winged dogs, and a voracious “self-portrait” embedded within The Happiness of Dinosaurs DNA. Unexpectedly, Dono’s charming, irrational abandon begins to oddly make sense.