Interpretations of Saiful Razman's recent paintings as a frustrated record of an urbanite's experience, or as a signifier of our stultifying political climate, have often overlooked a key element of modern painting that is visited by the artist in his most recent solo exhibition, Pelan-Pelan dan Bilik Gerakan.

Saiful's paintings -- described as ‘plans’ -- are composed of matrixes of distributed paint, scrolled in near-even columns and rows across the canvas surface with a paint roller. Each swath is brick-like, forming a flat impassable wall that erects itself as an obstruction towards depth. If this is seemingly what the passages of the paint is suggesting, then the device used to formulate this sense of stasis or 'impassability' needs to be examined.

I am referring specifically to the grid that is central to the composition of these plans. I want to underscore the grid in particular as a means of addressing the formal experiment that is present in Saiful’s works. Moreover, because of the conceptual weight the grid carries as a modernist painterly strategy, it is antithetical to the very hermeneutic of the paintings as possibly referential or textual or metaphorical.

In the history of modern art, the grid emerged as a particular, formal composite. Its near ubiquity in the works of artists such as Mondrian, Picasso, Reinhardt, Schwitters, Lewitt point to a specific strategy that is described by Rosalind Krauss as an "imperviousness to language" and a "refusal of speech"¹.  This level of ‘purity’ is also a dialogical challenge to traditional narrative, to expel the painterly subject from the pictorial surface, and hence through this catharsis, to render painting as a modular statement of originality - a clean break from the past.

More than this, Krauss has further argued, "The grid's mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction)". To speak of the grid is to find within its structure a particular paradox that has attended modernity - the chasm (as well as the fine line) between scientism and faith.

Its seeming order through its geometricised and flattened construction all point towards a level of reflexivity that is characteristic of modernist paintings in the study of critical abstraction. In Saiful's case, to evoke the notion of plans, as blueprints, as stratagem or as record, is to attach the disciplinary rigour associated with scientism, but at the same time, the artist’s statement about the works representing decay and stagnation betray an admission towards the metaphysical, not unlike Mondrian's and Malevich's discussion of neo-plantonic transcendence in their painterly quest.

When decay is mentioned, it is very often misunderstood as a possible subject of the meaning of the paintings, rather than cluing us into how the process is constructed in Saiful's paintings. This process I am speaking of is the pervasive presence of entropy, articulated strongly in the instance when we view the series as a whole.

Seen this way, the paintings  describe the various stages and degrees of the grids' formation and destruction. In comparing 'Berhala' or 'Tersusun' with 'Terbilang' or 'Tertindas', we can also situate them along a temporal linearity, in which the former works, appearing more uniformed and coherent, are counter-pointed with the latter paintings that are murkier and less defined. But this fashioning is not propelled towards a coherent sense of order or perfection or stability, rather it does the very opposite.

The bleeding of the paint threatens the grid's very artifice, challenging its composition and shape with the inevitability of its obliteration. What emerges from this series is then a remarkable record of the destruction and collapse of the grid, so patently intruded upon by the entropic condition of all temporal matters.

In many sense, the Bahasa Malaysia titles such as 'tertindas' (bullied) or 'terbilang' (counted) and even 'tersusun' (arranged) are all prefixed by 'ter-' which is suggestive of an accidental tow beyond the control of an individual. If these are accidents, then there exists within the incident the factor of indeterminacy or unknowability that disrupts what is ordered - our plans, our knowledge, our blueprints and even our foresight. It can even be argued that what is accidental is the formation or the coming together of the grid. So that when we see the grid not as an original or essential but a prop or a construct, we also see its vulnerability and fragility.

Here, Saiful's process of repetition too undermines the very inflexibility of the grid's claim to originality. Once the grid is deployed, the artist, who is to continue working with its structure is required to work within its formal inflexibility. Hence repetition is an enunciation of the processual redundancy and stagnation, which is present in such an exercise.

Unlike Kurt Schwitter's belief that the grid facilitates beginning and birth through its claim to originality, the paintings not only suggest the fabricated nature of the grid, but also pronouncing it as an impermanent artifice located within a temporality, a structure with an endgame.

But with the demise of the grid as a process coded in Saiful’s pelan-pelan, is there any connection between his paintings and the second part of the exhibition - the so called 'Bilik Gerakan'?

Tacked with posters and photographs of the recent electoral campaign, a music video ala MTV as well as a collection of silk-screen on canvas that have reduced institutions and ideas into recognisable dimensionless logos, this politically charged room, locked in the back corner of the gallery seems like a lazy and downright opportunistic political playing field, a simulacra of a operation room, orchestrated as a propaganda machine of the pure image.

I want to argue that the rhythm between these two disparate forms of art-making, though tenuous, is present on closer examination. The buzz  and excitement generated through political content of this section could easily cloud what the 'Bilik Gerakan' really is - a container of our culture, which is a culture mediated by images. It is really a simulacra more than a propaganda or a celebratory shrine for the opposition party. The set up draws these issues in and neutralises its significance as populist screens.

If entropy is activated in Saiful's paintings, then the process of annihilation is also a method whereby the individual or the collective is de-subjectified. Entropy is a radical attack on any forms of meaning. Even as the conditions produced through entropy was an effective avant-garde strategy in dismantling traditional bourgeois aesthetic in the early twentieth century, its lease of life in post war consumerist pop culture transformed it into the spectacle.

Having painted the grid’s disintegration, the autonomous space of painting is also something that is pronounced as collapsed. Hence, that which invades into this vacuum is its other – the spectacle of the image. So as a sea of masses, our alliances, our faith, our political inclinations are governed by the fervid battle fought through a media war that screens, simplifies and spectacularises our convictions.

The outcome is a living display which is plainly a composite of images that is disconnected from the political reality that happened a few months ago. Perhaps when Nurul Izzah highlighted the element of 'gila-gila' in her opening speech, she unintentionally underscored the stance of non-seriousness as possibly farcical and meaningless.  

In seeing Razman taking on two divergent stategies, first to work through the reflexivity of painting and then a putatively Duchampian agency towards art and life, sometimes we too forget to see Saiful as the performer in a post-modern sense. Through appropriating a number of strategies available in modern and post modern art practices, he has reflected rather than responded to broader social conditions in his formal experimentation, confessing to the ultimate inescapability of a younger generation artist gripped and enchanted by an image saturated world.



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1.  Krauss, Rosalind, ‘Originality of the Avant-Garde’ in October, Vol. 18 (Autumn, 1981), p. 54

Photos courtesy of the artist.

Simon Soon is a curator and writer. With a major in the History of Art and Literature, his current area of research and interest is in Southeast Asian contemporary art practices.