Aryo TOH DJOJO Spectra May 24 –July 5, 2025
- Gen de Art
- 13 hours ago
- 2 min read
As the temperature in Hong Kong ticks slowly upward toward 28 degrees Celsius, flying saucers steadily emerge from seven dark flat voids. This isn’t an alien invasion or archangels descending from Heaven, but the slow revelation of Aryo Toh Djojo’s groundbreaking new series of thermochromic paintings. These works on canvas come to life—as much as inanimate painted surfaces can be literally brought to life—through subtle shifts in room temperature, fluid circumstances that determine the visibility of the imagery.
Across the room from these heat-sensitive apparitions hover three soft-edged abstract paintings, born from the artist's interest in drone music, transcendental meditation, and photographic light leaks. Thermally reactive like the UFO images, the color field paintings reveal and conceal nonrepresentational chromatic atmospheres, suggestive of the inner energetic spaces we human beings can access through deep meditation.
The paintings in this room are immersed in a quiet, layered soundscape created by four separate tracks playing on CD players around the gallery. The tracks loop manipulated field recordings, drone, and fragments of melody, an approach inspired by a workshop Aryo took with Brian Eno. Each track runs at a different length, so they never quite align, amplifying the thermal paintings' slippery, shifting, and ever-indeterminate spatial condition.
The hallway leading to the second gallery offers two contemplative moments during passage. A painting of a long, sinewy candle flame burns with devotional intensity. Another depicts the serene blue head of Siddhartha, echoing Buddhist statuary, set against a bright white ground. These works form a hinge—offering a pivotal moment of prayer before plunging into the intensity of the second gallery.
In the adjacent space, we are surrounded by highly realistic airbrush paintings, each with its own surreal narrative. Aryo uses larger canvases and traditional acrylic paint here to probe mysticism and the unknown. These are mostly representational works, save for a couple of light leak-inspired abstractions, all existing in a sci-fi/spiritual slipstream.
If the first room unfolds slowly and the hallway offers a pause, this gallery reads like a sequence of sharp mythological, extraterrestrial transmissions. A giant six-fingered hand waves—or grasps—at us from one canvas, an allusion to the alien DNA some speculate lies buried in our human genome. A nude female figure appears in another composition; for Aryo, she is a spirit guide, possibly part alien, her presence marked by ambiguity and a steady, searching gaze. In another, a jet-black orb hovers above a flat, nondescript horizon, promising heavy existential oblivion.
—Text by Jan Dickey
Seven Angels (image transformation as temperature rises), 2025
Acrylic and thermochromic paint on canvas 35.6 * 45.7 cm each
Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
