Since three years back, the main idea of the artistic process in Nurrachmat Widyasena works is about the Space Age. The Space Age that he refers in his theme, is about the zeitgeist of all mankind of the world during the 1940s until the 1980s, when people dream, predict, and try to realize how human will live in outer space and how space travel was a thing that commonly found. In the Space Age era, there are a lot of justifications and promises of modernism that states the Space Age as a destiny of humanity to a better life, especially in the field of technology.
With the end of the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States which is the main engine that driving the Space Age, the spirit of space exploration as the fate of humanity as fade in the end of the Space Age. All the passion, attention and discourses that was celebrated by most people in the world at that time began to fade and forgotten by the end of the Space Age. The dream of man where at some point in the 2000s to achieve cutting-edge technological achievement still be a dream at the present time. As part of the world and as the generation that born after the spirit of the Space Age faded, Nurrachmat feel an anxiety that can be raised about these problems. He did not see the Space Age as an advance in technology alone, he saw how the Space Age with the help of technology and science, trying to sharpen, update, and establish both culturally and politically would dream of the future of mankind to live better globally.
Departing from these anxieties, Nurrachmat tries to recall the “old but forgotten Space Age ideas” which is then represented in the form of art using the application techniques of printmaking, installation and drawing. He creates works using these techniques that ultimately shaped in metal screen printing, acid metal, drawing, and installation of metal papers that are arranged. It is an attempt to create the sensation of the old ideas that are not realized or forgotten, retro futuristic, and archaic. Positioned himself as a part of the mankind that celebrates the spirit of the Space Age, Nurrachmat try to pull back to the present as well as the promises of modernism celebrated by mankind in the era of the Space Age.
In general, the works produced by Nurrachmat based on juxtaposition. Juxtaposition is an effort to stimulate creativity in problem solving or other creative achievement by forcing two or more concepts or ideas that are not related into a single object unit that can be equated or compared. The value of juxtaposition in Nurrachmat works is presented not only in the material works, but also of the value of philosophy and ideology of the context in which it was appointed. Posed in the context of this work is the context of the reality that has been achieved in the history of the Space Age and the fantasy context of the visions / dreams that discourse and leveled during the Space Age. Besides, he also filed the context of how the Space Age considered representing two roles, the context of the Space Age as a tool to serve the interests of the nations and the Space Age as an era that represents the spirit of all mankind in the future. He hoped when the contexts in this work was executed into a single unity, it will present an interpretation of the pattern that just read not only through the perception of the sign, but also perceived through the point “feeling”, so that the observer can relate their own experiences with the proposed visual.
