ArtReview profiles the late Balinese artist Dewa Raram, known as Oototol, whose rarely exhibited large-scale ink paintings are now on view. Created in the early post-Suharto reform era, these monochrome works depict uniformed soldiers in ambiguous, often tender or absurd scenarios—kissing, cradling cats, riding crocodiles—blending political critique with queer eroticism. Oototol, an illiterate self-taught artist who died in 2008, kept these works mostly private among his peers in Pengosekan Village, but they are now shown at Fort Gansevoort, New York.
This exhibition matters because it brings belated attention to a singular voice in Indonesian modern art, one that subverts the country's military legacy and patriarchal norms through playful, theatrical imagery. Oototol's work gains new resonance amid Indonesia's democratic backsliding, making his coded critiques of authority and queer desire newly legible. The show also challenges the marginalization of self-taught, non-canonical artists from the Global South, expanding the art-historical narrative beyond mainstream figures.