I didn’t grow up with a "I Want to Believe” poster in my room, but “The X-Files” definitely helped shaped my version of the 1990s. Of course, there had been conspiracy and UFO type films and TV before, but “The X-Files” tapped into something deeper than just “are there/aren’t there” aliens and into the psychological, exhilarating, and sometimes terrifying search to reveal that there is something more to this universe we live in. Or there is something else on this Earth with us, that there unexplained things that just need to be understood and appreciated as such. We don’t need to know the answers, we just want to know that there is a possibility to ask the question.
I have said in a past essay, but we need more UFO’s in art. But in saying this, it’s not solely what Aryo Toh Djojo’s work is about, and his new show at Perrotin in New York, Leap Into the Void, is a contemplation of the otherworldly nature of the times we live in, where contemporary technology and analog memories collide and coalesce into something completely new. The airbrush technique he uses will create this hazy atmosphere of a distant landscape, enhancing that parallel universe feel, but they are works that show Los Angeles in a certain cinematic light. Like Richter in his landscapes, Djojo is looking to the city he lives, and instead of something that would appear photorealistic, he is challenging our own perception of time and space. I wrote this a few months ago about Djojo’s work, and it rings true, “When he began to get more attention for his otherworldly airbrush works, and the sometimes sneaky/sometimes overt use of UFO’s in his paintings, there was a reading that the work was about film and conspiracy as opposed to pushing what our understanding of self and the world around us. The UFO and alien was about exploration, belief, disbelief, wonder and expanse. What are we and what surrounds us?”
There is always something new that he is exploring in his shows (there is sound in this one, too), and he accompanies the new paintings with a series of Polaroids. But here he modifies them, collecting all his documenting of UFO sightings over the years and creating a sort of continued hybrid of what is real and what is imagined.
Back to “The X-Files,” Mulder often frames his position as choosing to believe in the possibility of something beyond ordinary explanation, even without proof. Scully (literally my favorite character ever), counters with a demand for evidence and a scientific mind that resists jumping to extraordinary conclusions. I always remember that their best exchanges usually have Scully offering a rational, medical, or scientific explanation for a phenomenon, and Mulder pushing back with "but what if...". The tension between faith and empiricism is really the heart of their partnership, and I think is at the heart of Djojo’s work. There is more out there, and as an artist, he is vessel to that aesthetic. —Evan Pricco
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