Magnified Ordinary: Devy Ferdianto and the Art of Looking Closer

Some artists spend their whole lives searching for a rhythm. For Devy Ferdianto, rhythm has always been there—whether in the press of ink against paper, the flow of a jazz big band, or the natural pulse of a day unfolding without a plan. Born in 1968 in Sukabumi, Devy has lived three decades inside the world of printmaking, stretching its possibilities across borders and generations.

A   Life   Etched   in   Prints  and  Rhythms

Devy trained as a fine art student at Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB), where the solid roots of technique took hold. But Devy’s appetite for exploration carried him further, first to Germany, then to Canada, where he deepened his craft and exposed himself to different visual cultures. His heroes? Artists as eclectic as Andy Warhol, Frida Kahlo, and Raden Saleh. From Warhol, perhaps the permission to bend popular imagery into something daring. From Kahlo, the intimate courage to turn daily experience into myth. From Raden Saleh, a reminder that the arch of Indonesian art history is both a legacy and responsibility. 

Despite more than thirty years of experience, Devy’s first solo exhibition only came in 2021. But waiting that long doesn’t mean stasis. In those years, he was teaching, mentoring, printing, experimenting—living. By the time he unveiled his own work, it arrived not as a debut but as a culmination, dense with knowledge and textured with time.

In 2019, Devy moved to Bali. Two years later, in September 2021, he founded Devfto Printmaking Institute, an independent studio dedicated to nurturing young artists and, just as importantly, making printmaking accessible in Indonesia. This is a place where people can learn more about what’s considered as passion by Devy. A space with the kind of openness that reflects Devy himself, with his generous spirit and excitement to share with others. In this space, on July 10th 2025, Ruang Arta Derau (RAD) team held a video interview with Devy in preparation for the exhibition: Magnified Ordinary.

True, with his solo exhibition, Magnified Ordinary, Devy reminds us that the ordinary is never just ordinary. It is raw material, waiting to be pressed, bent, magnified, and seen anew.

The   Convex  Lens   and   the   Everyday

At the heart of Magnified Ordinary lies a deceptively simple device: the convex lens. On the surface, it’s just optics—a bulging circle of glass that enlarges the center and bends the edges. But in Devy’s hands, it becomes something else entirely: a metaphor for how we live.

Think about it. Our lives always feel sharpest at the center, where we stand, where things are immediate and personal. But at the edges, where memory, time, and emotion curve away, things grow blurred, distorted, surreal. The convex lens makes this visible, tangible. It swells the present moment while reminding us that nothing stays still for long.

Devy isn’t someone who plots meticulously. He doesn’t keep a rigid map of what’s next. His work flows the way his days do: spontaneous, responsive, open to accident. This exhibition reflects that rhythm. Beyond the visual arts, Devy is also a passionate jazz enthusiast and serves as the conductor of the Salamander Big Band, blending his love for rhythm and improvisation into both his music and visual work. Recently, his curiosity has turned toward photography. He sees it as a cousin to printmaking: both involve light, exposure, layering, process. Photography, with its immediacy, deepens his experiments, and the convex lens becomes a perfect bridge between the two mediums: a tool that collapses wide perspective into a single frame while still attending to detail.

The result? A body of work that doesn’t just show images. It presses them, stretches them, lets them pulse against the frame. Each piece asks us to look again at things we’ve ignored: the humble, the domestic, the repetitive. As if saying: this is where meaning hides.

Daily   Life,   Surreal   Life,   Still   Life

The exhibition unfolds across three intertwined layers, each one a different way of seeing.

Daily Life. Here, Devy captures the overlooked fragments: a table with food, a shadow across the floor, a gesture repeated naturally it becomes invisible, like playing with a pet dog. (AKU LIHAT FOTO-FOTO INI DI IG MBAK. BTW AKU BUTUH FOTO-FOTO KARYA PAK DEVY DEH BUAT ARTIKEL INI). These works feel almost like diary entries, but not confessional. Instead, they remind us of how much of living happens in passing—how easy it is to miss the poetry under the veil of domesticity.

Surreal Life. If daily life records the outside, surreal life records the inside: distortions, emotional echoes, memories refracted through time. The convex lens is most playful here with edges warped and perspectives bent. These works have an emotional temperature, as if ordinary events had been steeped in memory until they turned strange.

Still Life. At first, still life might seem the most traditional. Objects arranged. Surfaces paused. But in Devy’s hands, these still lifes are not static, they are deliberate, reflective, almost suspended in time. They remind us that stillness itself can be alive, that an object can carry its own memory.

Together, these three layers form a constellation of stories. The works don’t unfold in sequence; they appear as fragments where each fragment amplifies the ordinary until it becomes extraordinary. Each fragment is both magnified and enclosed, domestic and transcendent.

This is the subtle brilliance of Magnified Ordinary. It doesn’t shout. It asks. It doesn’t lead. It nudges. And in doing so, it brings us closer to the textures of our own everyday lives.

Looking  Again,   Seeing   Differently

There’s a quiet confidence in how Devy builds this exhibition. He doesn’t offer spectacle for spectacle’s sake. Instead, he trusts in the power of attention itself. To look again. To notice. To give weight to the things that otherwise pass.

The prints and photographs here are more than aesthetic exercises. They’re meditations on time, memory, and perception. They balance control with chance: the precision of printmaking with the unpredictability of photographic exposure. Intent collides with accident. And somewhere in that collision lies the truth of experience, that life is both what we shape and what we stumble into.

But Magnified Ordinary is not only about Devy’s vision. It’s also about the future of printmaking itself. By staging this exhibition, Devy hopes to ignite curiosity, especially among young artists. He wants them to see printmaking not as a relic, but as a living, breathing practice that is capable of reinvention, of relevance, of surprise. In his hands, it is not just ink and paper, but a way of thinking, a way of slowing down and truly looking.

Opening night at Ruang Arta Derau (RAD) on 18 July 2025 carried this spirit forward. With a live music performance by Olen Rianto and Jeko Fauzy, the atmosphere echoed Devy’s own blend of precision and improvisation where discipline and spontaneity meet. The exhibition resonated so strongly that it was extended until 18 August 2025.

For us at RAD, Magnified Ordinary feels like a reminder. One we all need. To pay attention. To linger. To hold the everyday in our hands and realize it is already enough. Devy’s works bend our vision just slightly, so we can see the familiar as if for the first time. Because sometimes, the extraordinary is already here. It just takes the right lens.