These Paintings Mix Childlike Whimsey With The Surreal

Roby Dwi Antono's paintings are like something out of an Alice in Wonderland fever dream. Children and monsters made of animal parts dine on a live crocodile at a fancy table. A rabbit breastfeeds a human baby while dinosaur-headed children play outside with a tyrannosaurus rex. Creepy evil-eyed children bleed a tiny whale into a bowl containing a severed human head.

This Yogyakarta-based artist has made a career out of mixing the childlike with the surreal. His work is a bit whimsical and a bit menacing, as if he is tapping into the darker roots of fairy tales back before they were sanitized by Disney and stripped of all the cannibalism, suicide, and violence.

"I can't deny that a lot of my work has to do with sadness, pain, mystery and other 'dark' subjects," Roby said. "I do have an affinity for melancholy. And a lot of the time, I am inspired by things closest to me—like my family. Some bad things have happened to my family, one of which was the sudden death of my older sibling. That shocked my mother and I to our very core, and it inspired a lot of my earlier pieces.

"My work since then, including  'Sepenggal September' ('A Piece of September') were also inspired by those dark days. Sometimes substitute the rabbit with little kids. That's because there is also a part of me that is still a child."

Roby is best known for Kinci, a young girl with a large bunny head that helped launch his career. He was up late one night sketching out character when he stumbled across Kinci. He liked how the illustration looked, so he posted it to Facebook. The sketch was an attempt at approximating the surreal style of U.S. artist Mark Ryden. Soon, he was producing an entire world's worth of paintings for characters like Kinci to inhabit.

"I get these questions and comments like 'this is weird, why do you have a house and a Power Rangers figure [in the same painting]?'" Roby said. "The truth is, I use these things that seemingly look random, but they really aren't. There is a common thread between the symbols I use. It's not just some random collage.

"Why do I draw, for instance, a girl with tweezers as one of her hands? These are actually inspired by my childhood imagination and the TV series I watched at the time. I saw a lot of Japanese superheroes and monster villains. They stayed with me as a grown man. The tweezer is a symbol of defense or a weapon which we take out when we feel attacked, not just physically but also mentally."

His work has graced the cover of an album by Danish dream-pop act Sleep Party People and will be shown at Artstage Singapore this month, and at Art Fair Philippines in February.