Anyone stepping into Pangrok Sulap’s studio is likely to notice at the top of the room, on a wall which divides the main space and leads to smaller rooms used to store works and materials, a few worn prints, slightly smeared, where the black ink struggles to contrast on cheap kraft paper. For over ten years, the poor-quality ink, remnants of discarded press material, has spread oily beyond the firmly cut shapes. This series was initiated during a workshop with the legendary group Marjinal, pioneers in woodcut as an interactive artistic medium. It still lingers symbolically like an ever-evolving passage through the printings of so many projects, trips and collaborations – endless tours, like those of a band, which they are, and always the aesthetic remains, like a refrain, under the yellowed tint of old etched scores.

There is a subtle connection between Pangrok Sulap and music. By unravelling this thread one can be freed from the validation that confines plastic creation within judgements based on the « good, » the « beautiful, » or its “value” to engage in a fluid and natural relationship. Ironically, such performative and social phenomenon asserts itself as a more liberated and meaningful artistic form than Art defined as a quality – which is its very negation. By freeing the experience, one’s consciousness is shifted into a richer acuity of senses, where low signals – breath, white noise, echoes, grain – strengthen density and meaning. Just to be found in other forms in printmaking.

Behind museums walls and the international celebration of Pangrok Sulap underlies the risk of a hollow relationship to the deep nature of the works, when they are too directly and conveniently labelled and tied to the field of Art alone. Projecting onto them such a stable state impoverishes a charge that far exceeds their objectual dimension. Attempts to reconnect through texts would formalise such artificial gaps, breaking the unity of experience and disconnecting the multiple layers of meaning that loudly emerge from the artwork’s indexical field. Why romanticize the pseudo-void of the cuts, when feeling the resistance of the tool is already to interpret the act and to become one with it? Print is something to both read and play, together a language and a noise. 

The proof speaks and offers itself to be felt. Gesture becomes a presence manifesto, while traces of the tool recede back to the intention. Behind the work lies a discourse; in the work, a physical reality that transcends its nature and resonates with forms far broader, evolving or organic, through a social pulse and a constant renewal. Simple tiny inflections, subtle reliefs: the rebounds of acts in the eye that the mind performs in return. Something like a sound, a distant song that stirs at the edges of hearing and engages us. The sound of salience.

Pangrok Sulap would easily crumble under the strict charter of artistic acceptability. No singular prominent author to claim the intent; no dominant hand – or rather, dozens, hundreds; no pretension to form beyond process; even less of its negation as a product, dissociated from its strict imperative of emergence and confused with the conditions of its performance. Not a pretext either, a means certainly, and the result of lucid and organised will, acknowledging the crucial role of decision in generating possibilities. No superior identity of the group in a dilution of individuals, each fully engaging their own thinking and acting self. No strict end in completion, since the work continues from what it allows – development projects, awareness campaigns, social actions, and sharing.

While discourse is crucial for Pangrok Sulap – defined as an act and intent – it establishes no authority or precedence. The image never resolves into illustration or visual statement, nor does it exist for or by itself. The mere message never cancels out the performative temporality or the broader significance of the act. Subjects here are always the impulse of a larger narrative, a melody that haunts, which one pleasantly can hum while leading their own story in turn. Salience calls for synaesthesia. Salience clings to the world. It lies in traces, in the inflections of the supporting material, from wood to paper and to a rippling fabric in space.

An undeniable aesthetic remains, more conscientiously developed than invented, of superior density and a sign itself. The tool asserts layers of causality intertwining mind and hand, and through it, a potentiality of meaning arises under a diffused form of consequence. Much has already been said about the origin and strength of this visual imprint, rooted in punk, alternative circles, always driven by the will to share and create, to facilitate one through the transparent and simple mastery of the other, to elevate the act to the freeing scale of DIY, to find in each person the radical of a common means, dissociated from all expectation or judgement, and to liberate a form of speech. The artwork, as the solid result of a process and a phenomenon itself, can equally be apprehended as one fragment among others out of an ever-evolving practice, looping from whole to part and return. Quality is no more a limitation, but a celebrated asset of time and experience, expending Art in a fully embrassing state.    

To see, exchange, or share with Pangrok Sulap is to rely on a powerful drive and train oneself in its inertia. Like music makes bodies dance, without injunction, with great joy.