CONCEPTUAL TILING

Intuition completes creative thought. It is an obvious notion and one that has long been the foundation to Fauzulyusri art making, easily read in his innocent child-like images and random urban narratives, essentially unrefined. For this new body of work that intuition, or autonomic process, has become the very premise for these paintings - the act of censoring one’s compulsion to complete or understand. To put it another way, to be able to disconnect sufficiently from our conscious dogma and constructed memories to allow those fractured, subconscious thoughts to float to the surface giving way to a clarity that sits somewhat closer to the truth through its very lack of inhibition – its rawness. 

Comprising 70 luscious bite-sized paintings, this exhibition offers an anthology of emotions, a kind of dictionary of gestual expressions, each individual and uniquely Fauzulyusri.  This schema of visual language is one the art theorist Gunalan Nadarajan has describes as the ‘ontology of painting’, a description I would happily adopt for RAW.  And like any dictionary, these canvases become a reference book that contains the grammar, the punctuation and the etymology of painting for Fauzul.

As he explains, “Usually when we look at small sized pieces they are related to studies or the experimental process (big sized works look more serious, more 'complete'). But in fact, the study is interesting in its own right. Applying this to my work, I am looking at elements of the subconscious, the approach and the aesthetic value. The subconscious deals with my sensitivity, emotions and expression. In other words only myself. The approach deals with the formal aspect of painting techniques such as line, colour and texture, while the aesthetic deals with the subjective. For me this is the nexus of RAW.”

In essence, RAW is the visualizing of an idea not its finessing.  While such a premise, one would imagine, would lead to a feeling of discombobulation, walking around this exhibition it has the sureness of a metronome’s meter. RAWs potent little pictures - what I think of as conceptual tiles - wrap their way around the gallery connected as a horizon slicing the gallery’s ocean of whiteness. It is unwaivering in its vision.

What has become apparent, for the first time, is the energy held between the adjacent images rather their conclusive singularity. It produces a regulated visual and tactile pulse.  It is the same feeling that we get when viewing a landscape through the window of a train – fractured elements that describe the journey rather than the place.  Moving along this line, its moods shift with a kind of musicality.  It imparts the verve of an improvised composition; of Thelonoius Monk, John Cage or Philip Glass.  Our eye bounces from childish scribblings to cool amoebic forms floating on fields, from muddy textured palettes to bright isolated punches, or the gibberish of an unconscious stream of text against the sentimental sketch of the artist’s new truck, for example. Collectively these disconnected ideas are balanced across the gallery space, where arrangement becomes both an internal and an external consideration.

This abstraction of rhythmic measure is the foundation of human musical participation, like the clapping of hands or more simply described by the musicologist Scholes as identical clock-ticks divided into "tick-tock-tick-tock".  The banality of the rhythm allows the element of surprise to emerge and the subconscious to play. Fauzul’s standard meter - a 46 x 46 cm square – offers that pulse, that symmetry from which a new depth to his painting is achieved.

Take for example the string of images: “No. 27“ with its inscription ‘painter’, humble yet probing; “No 22” and its demand ‘no blue’ on a defiant textured red field, to “No 3” stepping increasingly towards an abstracted psychological play and pushing painting into the structure of collage. These paintings are extremely focused and honest.  No longer is the image caught beneath layers of paint as with Fauzul’s last series PLAY. Many of these new paintings seem to be very smooth, cut back in around the object with an uncharacteristic flatness. It has the same level of experimentation as Fauzul’s former fascination to exposed the jute superstructure, but these newer works offer greater clarity. As Fauzul explains, “I didn't want to think too much about the image but rather about the form I was painting. I saw a car as a line, a boy or girl as layers of colour, or abstract forms as a mark-making process. I have tried to 'expose' these elements in this series.”

In the same vein one could pluck the more figurative examples: “No 38” for its random units of story-telling using familiar and characteristic objects; “No 16” with its unconscious erasing of the narrative in a blanket of whiteness so that its internal light emerges as the predominant subject, and “No. 47” with its sea of cerebral text dividing the painting between a rant and quiet.  In all, the subject becomes form. Such groupings and connections across this exhibition are infinite, and indeed Fauzul invites viewers to create their own.

Fauzul’s ‘conceptual tiles’ do not aim to be a classification of his painting. Rather, these explosive little paintings short-circuit our desire for definition. They have become cross-fertilized through his prolonged and intimate romance with paint. Call it a dictionary, musical improvisation, or a survey exhibition - it doesn’t matter – what does is the way it describes Fauzul’s aggregated vocabulary since the 1990s. Aptly titled RAW, this exhibition is a brave and adventurous ode to painting, stripped bare.

Gina Fairley