Autre Magazine

View Original

Lust, Aliens and Summer Nights: Aryo Toh Djojo's Crepuscular World Stuns and Frightens

Aryo Toh Djojo’s world is a crepuscular world where the distant buzz of alien spacecraft whirs like a high voltage transformer, arcing between coils with the secret blue language of electricity. This is also the language of Djojo’s paintings, which were recently on view at Sow & Tailor in Los Angeles. They are hard to pin down, they are elusive and evocative, which makes them hit that spot between nostalgia and eroticism. This is your brain on UFOs, weed, and the hot magnesium flash of lust. Inside the hinterlands of Djojo’s hyper-realistic airbrushed canvases, there is the feeling of eternal summer, but also alien abduction, which could be seen as a metaphor for the amnesia of youth—for the forgetting of yesterday to live for today.