Nathaniel Amaris works from a small home studio in Bogor, which he refers to as Studio 23. After withdrawing from his fine art studies at ISI Yogyakarta, he began painting independently — developing a practice shaped by lived experience: precarity of everyday life and a longstanding sensitivity, propelled by what he describes as a gift of clairvoyance. Diagnosed with bipolar and schizoaffective conditions in early adulthood, Amaris has spoken openly about how painting became part of both coping and coming to terms with a psychic acuity that it entails. He has since conducted art workshops in psychiatric institutions, participated in community-led exhibitions, continued to teach privately — and, of course, painted. 

Amaris’s paintings centre on the human figure, most times nude, in motion or suspended in stillness. The identity of these figures is unmarked, there is no biographical detail suggested. Figures stand, walk, crouch, or lean in what feels like caught mid motion, within atmospheric fields where orientation is withheld: no clear horizon line, no architectural markers, no perspectival anchors. 

Across all works, Amaris sustains a tightly controlled emotional temperature, with surfaces built through layered, translucent applications of paint and light, too, structured as a material presence. Light enters vertically in narrow beams or floats within the body’s orbit as orbs or pulses. In Asuh Asih Asah (2025) the figures are holding orbs of light in what seems to be a joyful moment, which culminates in a luminous dome — a frequent element in Amaris’s morphology of symbols. Amaris explains that this is an ommage to his Sundanese heritage with its joyous spiritual nature.

In Wind of Change (2025), a solitary figure moves forward through a low, windswept field. The body leans slightly, as if pushing into resistance, with one arm drawn in and the other loosely extended. Her long, dark hair is carried backward, held aloft. Above, translucent arcs dominate the background and create the sense of a pressure field. The sky is vacant, drained of colour. There is no fixed light source. The figure doesn’t seem to be fleeing, arriving, or confronting anything directly. She is simply in movement - but the direction is ambiguous. Is she walking toward something, or through it?

The dome of light returns again in Eternal Flame (2025), where the figure moves at the edge of balance, with her limbs extended but soft, the gesture caught between surrender and assertion. Red tones rise from her feet and hands, reaching into the hair, which lifts ferociously, pulled by a current outside the frame. The body becomes the flame.

In In the End, We Meet Again (2025), a lone figure is captured mid-motion, mid-sentence? as if it’s caught off-guard between vertical poles of light, that, defying the laws of nature is ascending instead of illuminating downwards. Hands and feet glow with vivid red, one arm reaches forward. The composition is symmetrical but unstable, shaped by compression and vertical force. If there is a meeting here, it is not between bodies. It is between the body and what it cannot name.
 

The paintings carry immense emotional weight, and yet the protagonists themselves carry very little expression. They appear suspended in proximity - never fully closed off, but never opened to the point of logical resolution. They feel like a whisper, or a premonition. It’s through the way the body is positioned in space, through how light passes, through what is held back - that we feel something, even before we understand. This ability to produce feeling before cognition psychoanalyst and artist Bracha L. Ettinger describes as matrixial borderspace — a kind of shared psychic terrain, a zone of shared vulnerability, where boundaries between self and other become porous, and subjectivity is shaped through proximity and co-feeling.

His research into neurodivergence and mental health in Indonesia could offer one of the keys to understanding why Amaris’s work feels so liminal. In a society where emotional expression is oftentimes constrained by both cultural expectations and the lack of open discourse on mental health, these paintings offer sites of disclosure. The psychic figures may be read as carriers of unseen burdens, as witnesses to something collective and unspoken — the “unshowable” as scholar Ariella Azoulay calls it. Something that is understood not by showing it directly, but by creating a kind of energetic tension around it. 

His Sundanese identity is central to Amarys’s work. He describes a cultural contradiction that worries him: a deep commitment to spiritual practice, held alongside a persistent inhibition of emotional expression. Sundanese cosmology itself offers some epistemological clues to his work. In Sundanese belief systems, the universe is understood as layered: jagad gede, jagad leutik, jagad alit — the macrocosm, microcosm, and inner self - interconnected and in continuous exchange. Within this worldview, rasa — feeling, intuitive knowledge — is not secondary to reason, but foundational to it. 

And so, moving with Amaris’s rasa through the dense liminal landscape, we inevitably collect the knowing. It sticks to us without our noticing, and stays with us in its gentle humming — restructuring something in our matrix, and allowing us to become a better small part of the whole.

Bibliography:
Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008.
Csordas, Thomas J. “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology.” Ethos 18, no. 1 (1990): 5–47.
Ettinger, Bracha Lichtenberg. The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Geertz, Clifford. The Religion of Java. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.
Juliastuti, Nuraini. “Reclaiming Cosmologies: Local Knowledge, Resistance, and Cultural Translation.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 21, no. 3 (2020): 400–412.