Soni Irawan

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Yogyakarta, b. 1975

Soni Irawan was born on 15 January 1975 in Yogyakarta. He studied in the Visual Art Faculty (Fine Arts Department), majoring in Printmaking in the Indonesian Art Institute situated in Jogjakarta, Indonesia. A musician and one of the founders of a Jogjakarta experimental band Seek Six Sick, Soni's art is greatly influenced by the spirit and energy of rock music. His canvases are filled with spontaneous strokes, sketchy figures and cut out pieces, with the medium of oil bars chosen for their characteristic feel of roughness and boldness. His subject matter, however, tends to be largely personal topics that revolve around his family, environment and his underlying interest in capturing the spirit of human survival in everyday life.

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​Rather than painting a depth impression of gradual color changes or shadows, he uses main and unmixed colors for his objects, which are laid over each other in free composition. The roughness of the lines of these subjects and forms is inherent to his expressive primitivism woodcut prints. Unlike the relatively more free hand painting, and inherent to the process of the making of woodcut prints, the artist needs not only to think about the image but also how to build up the image using the different wood carved blocks for different coloring, etc to achieve the images as an artwork entity.