G13 Project Room: More Than Words by Fazreen Sukri

More Than Words, a solo exhibition by our local artist, Fazreen Sukri. In this new series of works, Fazreen brings his interest in the dialect of Kelantanese into his artworks. This contextual displacement of the dialect becomes his motive within his creative process as he put himself playfully displaces his own self towards the language through abstraction in an intense repetitive and layering of text. Fazreen will be sharing eight text-based artworks in this exhibition, and brings the audience to view his writing-as-scribbling-as-painting.

Painting has turned itself into something different because it has absorbed the high and low culture; it has become something that comprises both organic and synthetic materials.

Writing-as-scribbling-as-painting is how Fazreen engages with his artworks. It is emphasized by how Fazreen’s artistic practice is. He started to paint the canvas; then, he began to write a word or sentence repeatedly. At first, the process was very controlled, but eventually, his form started to diminish. From a controlled gesture, it becomes more hastily and carelessly written. Suppose one views the artwork at a glance. In that case, there is a fat chance the audience will notice that the painting is just an abstract painting with scribble on top, but the best way is to take a closer look and ‘read’ the artwork.

The repetition of the writing created a multi-layered version of the words, and the mixture of various mediums and treatments makes an overall sense of abstraction and ambiguity that is part of his artistic expression. The repetitive writing may initially seem arbitrary, but on the contrary, it is a deliberate act by Fazreen. The act of laying words repeatedly will make it unrecognizable. Each layer will make the word smudgy, inversed, vague, and in the end, make it more challenging to read at first glance.

More Than Words runs from 3 to 17 September 2022 at G13 Project Room.

• Fazreen Sukri