Galeri Ruang Dini presents Achmad Toriq’s solo exhibition Marginalia Lipatan Waktu, featuring works painted on canvases that resemble the pages of school notebooks.
Who used to doodle in the margins of their notebooks whenever class started to feel boring? Chances are, almost everyone has done it. What began as a simple way to pass the time often turned those little scribbles in the corners of a page into a space where imagination could run free.
For Achmad Toriq, this small habit holds much more than meets the eye. The doodles that once served as a simple way to beat boredom have now found their way back into his artistic practice, alongside the robots and heroes that once accompanied him through childhood.
Through his solo exhibition Marginalia Lipatan Waktu at Galeri Ruang Dini, Bandung, Toriq brings back iconic characters from animation, comics, and films spanning different eras. Rather than working on a conventional canvas surface, he transforms his painting surface to resemble the pages of a school notebook. On these pages, the characters appear almost like doodles scattered between the lines.
"At its core, the notebook is the main stage for this series of works, while the characters on its pages appear as marginalia: notes and doodles in the margins,” Toriq explains.
For Toriq, the works in this series function like time capsules. He takes fragments from the past, selects characters that once felt close to him, and brings them into a new space. As a result, his works do not attempt to recreate the past with precision. Instead, memory is given room to shift, mingle with imagination, and take on new forms.
To bring these characters back to life, Toriq revisited the series he once watched, read literature, and traced various visual references that had filled his childhood. This process places Marginalia Lipatan Waktu somewhere between personal memory and new interpretation.
The characters he chooses may have clear visual references, but Toriq does not attempt to reconstruct them precisely. Certain details are deliberately altered, compositions are rearranged, and specific elements are treated with greater freedom. This approach reveals how memory never really works like a complete archive. When recalled, it can change, shift, and mingle with experiences and imagination that came later.
Interestingly, the idea of time does not only emerge through the characters and stories from the past, but also through the process of making the works. Toriq crumples the canvas before turning it into a painting surface. The natural folds that emerge then become part of each work’s visual character.
The canvas surface is no longer simply a neutral, flat plane. Instead, it carries traces of the process it has undergone, much like a notebook page that has been folded, crumpled, or left with marks after years of use. In this way, the material itself becomes part of the story of time and memory.
This technique further strengthens the connection between the notebook, doodling, and the personal experiences at the heart of the exhibition. If the painted characters are fragments of the past, then the folds in the canvas become physical traces marking the journey of those fragments as they return to the present.
Ultimately, nostalgia in Toriq’s work is not simply an attempt to return to childhood. It becomes a way of looking at something familiar from a different distance in time. Characters that once appeared as part of his viewing and reading experiences are now revisited through the artist’s own experiences, memories, and intuition.
Achmad Toriq is an art educator and visual artist who graduated from the Fine Art Education program at Universitas Negeri Surabaya in 2015. He has actively exhibited in various cities across Indonesia, particularly in East Java, and has also been involved in various art community activities that have contributed to the development of the region’s art scene. In his practice, Toriq primarily works with acrylic paint on canvas and frequently explores childhood nostalgia, from films and comics to vintage posters. These elements are brought back through visuals that feel warm, evocative, and emotionally intimate.
The choice of characters, composition of elements, and alterations to certain details from the original references all form part of this personal process. In Toriq’s hands, familiar characters are not simply reproduced, but relocated into a new space where popular culture, memory, and imagination intersect.
Achmad Toriq’s Marginalia Lipatan Waktu runs from 7 August to 4 September 2026 at Galeri Ruang Dini, Jalan Anggrek No. 46, Bandung. The opening and Artist Talk will take place on Friday, 7 August 2026. For more information, visit Instagram @galeriruangdini.
