A Meandering Manifesto: A Response to ‘Precomposed Impressions’

…

Anatol’s practice presents a familiar layering of ideas—like someone drawing concentric lines one over another, trying to approximate a perfect circle. He tells me that this exhibition, Precomposed Impressions, in the front gallery of KINGS Artist-Run, [1] draws from an assemblage of visual analogues with images of the microbial world; eye floaters (the tiny, opaque shapes that seemingly hover on the surface of your eye); road crack sealing; neumes (early Western musical notation); and the dust caught during the digitisation of Anatol’s late grandfather’s standard 8mm films. At first glance, this layered approach might seem like an eclectic hoarding of ideas, bordering on obsession. Yet, recognising this tendency in my own practice, I understand the genuine interest in bringing together different materials, times, and ideas—both as a form of conceptual play and a hermetic pursuit of an enigmatic truth.

…

An acrylic sheet is etched with meandering lines that hover like liquid suspended in thin air. Their organic shapes and the arrangement of these clews of worms suggest a sense of movement—imagined meanderings I trace with my eyes. The sheet itself floats a few fingerspans in front of a green, gridded cutting mat; the layered artwork invites close attention. I lean in, my body curled like a question mark, trying to make sense of what I see. A fantasia of gestures emerge: long ones, short ones, and some resembling thin threads. What’s perplexing however, is how the engravings sit on the interior surface of the acrylic, their opaque forms defining the perception of depth.

Trying to make sense of this visual anomaly, I catch a glimpse of my own perspexed face in the reflection. [2] It’s as if this piece is waiting for me to notice it, noticing me back—vision returning its own gaze.

These reflexive slippages seem central to the works, drawing attention to the way perception becomes entangled with what is being perceived. This inward attentiveness recalls a long lineage of thinkers, from philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty to film theorist Laura Mulvey, who argue that vision is contingent, shaped by our bodies, our biases, and the instruments that mediate light. [3] But my favourite metaphor for vision comes from art historian James Elkins, who writes that “seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer. Seeing is a metamorphosis, not a mechanism.” [4] I’m still not entirely sure what he means, but it feels appropriate here, as the works bring about a persistent sense of questioning.

…

The unknown is often understood as a horizon for future knowledge, something to be conquered or controlled. Perhaps it’s more appropriate to consider the unknowable not as a problem to be solved, but as an inherent part of life, like breathing or the passing of time. This is acknowledged in Dharmic traditions, through the concept of Avyakṛta; for the Lakota, Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery; and in psychoanalysis, we are confronted with the Real, which resists symbolic representation. This shared awareness of the unknown resonates in Anatol’s practice, where art becomes a form of meditation, and the works linger in the uncertainties of perception.

…

Anatol permeates his solution transfer prints with a sense of fluidity, as though the images have osmotically diffused across the paper’s surface. Faint afterimages with mottled edges take shape like blurred memories once glimpsed through teary eyes, too delicate even for the paper to hold. Language seems to falter as I try to decipher these apparitions. In this moment of prolonged prehension—forms of awareness that arrive before conscious thought—my experience is guided less by the need to conceptualise the works than by embodied response. [5] My gaze drifts across colours that bleed into one another, forms that hover on the edge of recognition, and faint cartographies that speak like a field guide—a field guide to getting lost. [6]

Writer Rebecca Solnit notes that “lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.” [7] As a viewer, the latter is evident in the uncertainty Anatol’s works evoke; yet knowing that these solution transfer prints were sourced from civil engineering drawings and home movies belonging to his grandfather, the former feels equally poignant. And while we often assume that the opposite of ‘lost’ is ‘found,’ these works suggest another kind of un-lost; a traversal of something that can’t be undone, following paths once taken or walked by someone else. Un-losing oneself is important. As the essayist Susan Sontag suggests, “to understand something is to understand its topography, to know how to chart it. And to know how to get lost.” [8] A sense of Anatol’s seasoned wandering is visible in these works; his marks read like surefooted footprints pressed into snow.

…

These works lead me to consider the surface, which, as media theorist Giuliana Bruno suggests, is far from superficial; a site of contact and connection, where the material traces of life are made visible. [9] This attention arises not only from Anatol’s unique techniques, which render surfaces opaque and tactile, but also from the gestural resonances within the works. The engravings resemble sprawling bark beetle galleries in dead and dying trees. Elsewhere, growths of pigments bloom like mould in an old Melbourne sharehouse—the kind that feels older than the lease, the housemates, and perhaps even the building itself. The faint construction drawings and letterings embedded throughout the works also point towards the role of human labour in the surfaces we encounter: like lines on the road; grids in city planning; or how algorithms draw from our collective presence like desire lines through grass. These visual analogues suggest a sense of vitality in every line and residue, each mark an index of an action.

…

If ancient myths are to be believed, the first artworks emerged from an act of love. The historian Pliny the Elder tells the story of Kora, a Corinthian maid who traced the outline of her lover’s shadow on a wall as he prepared to leave for war. [10] This mythic gesture echoes prehistoric evidence: the hand stencils in the Cave of Maltravieso mark the survival of a community while sabretooth tigers and woolly mammoths roamed the wilds outside. In our contemporary relationship to drawing and other mark-making practices, entangled in notions of representation and mimesis, we often overlook its fundamentally indexical nature—the trace of the artist’s hand and their affections. Anatol’s works remind us of this origin, attentively working from his grandfather’s drawings and home movies, alongside a work that presents his mother’s annotations.

…

Notes written by Anatol’s mother, annotating her father’s home videos, are magnetised to a steel sheet. One reads “indistinct”; another “ODD SCRAP FILM”; and a third “INDISTINCT LANDSCAPES”. Thin strips of tape run down the flecked metal like soft barricades, partially concealing my blurry reflection in a pinstriped cage. Last summer, digitising my own family home movies, I felt the same inability to describe the videos beyond “x-mass 1997” or “Warnambool 1999”. Even the indistinct shots seemed too personal and overwhelming—watching the world through my parents’ gaze, seeing so much of myself in the way the camera lingered and moved. In a way, this work suggests that sometimes stories survive as titles alone, waiting; sometimes things appear too tender when you’re too close; and sometimes they exist for another’s eyes, just far enough away.

…

Our relationship to the index is entwined with our perception of time and the material world, a conflation that often obscures deeper connections. For the Huni Kuin people of the Amazon, kenés, a term loosely translated to mean drawing, function as indexical markers of invisible beings. [11] This connection is intensified through the Nixi Pae ritual, involving the hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca, enabling participants to experience a synesthetic perception of the world. Buddhist sky-gazing meditation similarly directs attention towards invisible ontologies, focusing on eye floaters—an entoptic phenomenon originating within the eye—where perception turns back on itself and encounters its own nothingness. [12] In a different way, divination practices such as tea reading or tarot offer indexical annotations of the future, suggesting that objects possess not only memory but also a kind of prophetic awareness. Ultimately, to read an index solely in relation to a material past obscures traces of realities that hover at the edge of our perception—what are our eye floaters trying to tell us?

…

Art often offers affirmation rather than image. The mark you’ve made is beautiful, and that is enough. You exist, and that is more than enough.

…

Leo Bagus Purnomo is an artist and researcher, born in Central Java, Indonesia, who lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia.

…

[1] Anatol Pitt, Precomposed Impressions, KINGS Artist-Run, 29 January – 22 February 2026.

[2] Perspex..ed.

[3] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Routledge, 2002): Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (October 1975): 6–18.

[4] James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On The Nature of Seeing (Harcourt Brace, 1997), 11–12.

[5] Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (The New American Library, 1948), 70.

[6] Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Viking, 2005).

[7] Solnit, A Field Guide for Getting Lost, 22.

[8] Susan Sontag, “The Last Intellectual,” The New York Review, October 12, 1978, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/10/12/the-last-intellectual/.

[9] Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 8–9.

[10] Pliny the Elder, Natural History IX, trans. H. Rackham (Harvard University Press, 1961), 271.

[11] Camila Maroja, “The Persistence of Primitivism: Equivocation in Ernesto Neto’s A Sacred Place and Critical Practice,” Arts, no. 8 (2019): 111.

[12] Flavo Geisshuesler, Tibetan Sky-Gazing Meditation and the Pre-History of Great Perfection Buddhism: The Skullward Leap Technique and the Quest for Vitality (Bloomsbury, 2024), 62.

…

To download a PDF copy of the text, click here.

This text was produced as part of KINGS x un Projects’ Emerging Writers’ Program 2025, supported by the City of Melbourne.