DUA — Sabri Idrus & Tony Twigg

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DUA :

On a chance meeting at TAKSU Kuala Lumpur, a long lunch turned into a profound discussion.

It was mid 2010 and it was a conversation around the kitchen table about abstraction and the shared belief in an inherent spirit within the object.

This year Sabri Idrus & Tony Twigg rekindled that chat over several months of emails and like meetings. Edited

by Gina Fairley, it completes their two-man show Dua.

GF Sabri your exhibition prior this two-man show was called Antara meaning in-between.

I am interested in your definition of the “in between” in your art making.

SI I see abstraction in images.

It is not that I’m against making images. It’s just that I find sanctuary in abstraction.

I mean I prefer the architectural aspect of art making - lots of thinking process and technically challenging methods using experimental and building materials. I find the challenges working with unconventional tools much more satisfying.

I see abstraction in images Sabri Idrus

GF Tony this is something you would relate to.

TT My own choice of tools comes from the need to make the thing as directly as possible.

I can’t escape the fact that my work sits somewhere between painting and sculpture.

It is more a reflection of the observer’s definition than mine.

In a similar way the subjective associations thrown up by the work shifts as it moves from place to place.

GF So the antara Sabri describes TT A few months ago an expert on Australian Aboriginal art bought a maquette for one of my works. He emailed describing the unmistakable similarity between it and Aboriginal art of northern Australia. A month later I was standing in front of the realised work in the BenCab Museum in the Philippines where it hangs next to a display of Bulul, rice gods from the Mountain Provence in the Philippines. The similarity was again unmistakable. It reveals the old truism about abstract art: that it is what the viewer brings to it.

For our purposes it may also illustrate the fact that there is a through-line that an artist takes. I would be happy to think of this as an in-between space and wonder how culturally specific that space would be?

This exhibition of Sabri’s and mine, I think, is an opportunity to ponder such questions.

SI Tony speaks of it as an ambiguous space. For me, this change occurs when I try to alter the basic way of looking at the canvas to making an object, between the surface and volume of space. Starting with fundamental art exercises I want to create something that captures a broader view.

You can only ‘push’ the surface when you have knowledge of the technical capability of the material. Knowledge gives you the freedom to experiment.

TT I think you are saying that rather than painting images, you are making objects. It has the materiality of an object in the real world, in so far as it is something that you have invented first in the terms of process, and then as an artwork. I see my own work this way - a factual reality held together in a precarious manner that is open to change.

SI You allow for the work to change. I am curious, when you design do you have certain things you consider like the space between the pieces or the depth of the object on the wall, plus the fact that I can alter their arrangement. How do you account for that change?

TT Those sorts of questions aren’t pre-considered but arise in the making, or the life thereafter of the work.

GF You mean you don’t draw it out before hand or use a computer to conceptualise the piece.

TT No. It is totally built in the studio responding to what is at hand.

SI That is the artist part. My work Native Gate (2011) started as a very thick surface and I had to work with that. It was an old doorframe I found and I joined the elements using copper pipe, mimicking traditional carpentry techniques. There was a level of improvising to resolve the work, and also in the way is can be hung. I suppose it is closest to the way you work.

everything around us is architecture Sabri Idrus

GF Both of you reference

work and are just as present in architecture in your recent Antara and these works made work and its abstraction in Bandung [Indonesia] using beyond a literal translation found wood from old structures. of a site / structure. How I like the idea that they can importance is site to the work? have a conversation across SI Everything around us is places, and respond to your work Tony. architecture. Architecture within architecture - the house, TT As an artist who travels a fair bit I find the sensation of living, digital information. displacement and disconnection If you look closely at this about as appealing as the web of information it has a sensation of placement and certain structure that connects connection. My preference is to between literal translation and avoid categorisation. Beyond conceptual perspective. It is a the idea that Filipino art would kind of graphic journey, and it is need to be made by a Filipino, this visual experience that flows or that only a Malaysian could over into my art making. Simply make Malaysian art, such by sharing similar terminologies classifications can impose and surface knowledge, stereotypically nationalist architecture becomes a kind subject matter on artists of language for me. who may also claim cultural TT Yes! It is not a literal ownership of such images. translation but more like It’s the mad thing that an echo, a presence. In the curators do: divide you up into architecture of the modern your country. I avoid those world the literal difference distinctions in my own work. between one place and another Can I migrate to Malaysia and is reduced. I agree with Sabri make Malaysian art? for the most part it is where we live. Sure some of it is inspiring SI Can. As I have said this work while most of it is blandly was made in Indonesia. Such neutral. The city is where I think categories are no longer of art, where I make art and relevant. We all work and sell where I place art, so I would feel across the region. confident in saying that my work is an extension of architectural space. But it is not an analysis of architectural space, it’s My preference more an intuitive elaboration or is to avoid manipulation of familiar forms.

SI The engagement of categorisation architectural qualities such as space, structure, senses and even time exist from my earliest Tony Twigg

GF Sitting around the kitchen table you got into an interesting conversation about abstraction in Malaysia and how that dovetailed into Islamic decoration, essentially the absence of the figure. I want to again visit this discussion. Sabri do you think that Islamic tradition of abstraction has a bearing on your work?

SI The Islamic concept is always in the work. It’s embedded already within the context. It is not separate. It’s one with me, not from the visual element, more to spiritually. Before I begin an artwork I would think something that might be the end of the work instead of just confronting a blank canvas. It must be something to trigger a start and that comes from my belief.

TT I don’t know anything about religion; it is not part of my world. For you, however, it’s like it is there before you even start.

SI Yes it is. Like day and night is related to time, Islam is always there. But I do confess the element of light has always been present in my artwork.

Unconsciously it’s been there from the beginning of my art making. Nur comes from the Arabic word which means light.

In reference to my work the meaning is used as a contrast to darkness.

TT Nur as you have called it, is central for me. When it is there it permeates my being bringing a sense of poise to my work.

Of course I’m not alone there.

Some artists talk about the Islam gave you the capacity to shimmer of light across a work believe in abstract marks and being the trace of spirituality the power and significance of while others settle for the abstract marks for themselves. theatrical representation of Riley spoke of the way marks light as a spiritual expression. pulsate and generate vibrations I’m attracted to the “concrete” that speak to you physically. perception of painting as a That is, abstraction as a retinal experience. For example palpable experience. One Op art, its basis was in a might imagine this is the sort form of geometric abstraction of experience Islamic nonthat was in a way impersonal representational images might and not obviously related to evoke? the real world. The Op artist SI I think it is true. If you translate Bridget Riley commented everything into some kind of “I couldn’t get near what pattern or symbol it is just mere I wanted through seeing, repetition. It is a repetition recognizing and recreating, of what you imagine. For so I stood the problem on me Islamic art is not about its head. I started studying patterning but more of a squares, rectangles, triangles spiritual approach that is not and the sensations they give ‘conventionally’ visual. rise to...It is untrue that my TT Somewhere I read or heard that work depends on any literary the truth of Islam rested in impulse or has any illustrative the beauty of the poetry of the intention. The marks on the Quran. I wonder if there is some canvas are sole and essential kind of truth in the poetry of the agents in a series of relationabstract mark? ships which form the structure SI Yes it is so. I think a similar of the painting.” How would this thing happens. In expression sit with the Islamic concept that everything is abstract – beauty, is always in your work? even eating or painting.

SI I like your mention of Bridget In the Quran the approach, historically, to anything is Riley; Agnes Martin also the very poetic. It carries great same. I want to be quiet significance. Whatever we to begin because it is the do it comes with our intent, quietness or the passing time Ni’at we call it. Every morning that is also an important when I wake up I will say contribution to what is going on “Alhamdulillah” (Praise to God), in the studio and work process. not because I have to do or say TT I still want to get to my something, but in thanks. question. I was after the idea The same when I brush my teeth of Islam in your work and not and consider a painting. trying to restrict it to the idea of pattern but wondering if

that in order to embark on the GF Tony you consciously removed whole abstraction process in the figure from your art art making I need to learn and making when you started understand many things before working in Asia and, in many deciding to translate that ways, turned to an embedded knowledge and purpose onto energy found within pattern the canvas. As for the case in and light.

Malaysia, mostly we Malaysians TT I tossed out the narrative of tend to perceive the concept of Australian identity and was abstraction not from its history left with something that looked and fundamentals but rather like abstraction, which is jump into a conclusion, which an idea. I got curious about then leads to the actions of art the role of abstraction in an making as you can see today in Islamic society, where the idea our country. of western abstraction might be considered foreign and, as I understand it, a dialogue with objects is verboten. courage is to It seemed potentially very produce a beautiful. I had come across Islam as a teacher at an quality work Australian art school when I had to modify the curriculum, fairly spontaneously, to meet the Sabri Idrus requirements of students who identified as Islamic. Of course there was a problem with life drawing. As I danced around the proposition of defusing the abstraction as a human figure, I stepped from palpable experience a discussion of a narrative to the experience of a sprit or a mood, an abstraction for want Tony Twigg of a better word.

SI I think I should not narrow the understanding of abstraction by considering reductionist approaches as part of the idea of abstraction. In the context of Islamic art the action of eliminating certain figures is justified by the whole concept of the religion Islam itself.

What I am trying to say is

GF Sabri, perspective played a key part in your last series.

Often you were looking up, through, or down onto an abstracted landscape. Tony, you rather discuss space as a movement between the 2D surface of the gallery wall and the 3D object, or as you like to say the positive and negative.

TT Yes, I am dealing with a fact not an illusion. It’s absolutely real.

It is right there in front of me, and it is in front of anyone who might care to engage with the work. Part of that engagement is observing the work from each side and in the process registering the shifts from being observably 2 dimensional to observably 3 dimensional.

I think it achieves a sort of spatial intangibility that doesn’t seem far from the illusionistic space that I read in some of Sabri’s works.

SI Often I see my work in 2 dimensions and the surrounding landscape as 3 dimensions. I think it is a context that I try to feature in the Antara series, perspective as content and a kind of storytelling that holds the work.

And with time, perspective became more outrageous and beyond. My curiosity when I see your work, there is always a shape – an oval, circle or fragmented shape. Do you consider the shape as your picture frame?

TT The shape is the picture. The shape is about pulling the circle apart, which means the centre collapses with gravity. The fact that some look heart shape, for example, is accidental. What I am interested in is the visual tensions within the action rather than the frame. I see the negative spaces as important as the object – the space and object are equal. Should, then, the picture frame include the ground of the wall? Maybe it is a rectangle after all with a determinate space around the form.

SI Personally I see it as a scaling or stretching a small work to make it big, so you space it out.

TT It seems to me that we are considering the question of setting up an independent reality in the artwork: one set of rules operate in the artwork, another set in reality. This generates a sort of tension that makes the artwork exciting. You do it also in a 2 dimensional plane. It imposes an intangibility that is appealing to me but could be mistakenly viewed as an illusionistic manipulation. \What you are perceiving when you look at the work is some sort of optical amalgamation that you make up. It is your experience of the work that you are feeling and it comes close to the ‘spirit’ we were talking about earlier.

GF You are both “old school” in the sense that you are very physical in the process of making your work yourself; there is a deep integrity in your making. What does that physical process mean to you?

TT I do all the work myself partly to preserve the work’s surface vitality, and partly because I often work in Australia where labour costs are prohibitively high. Each work seeks its conclusion as a sort of inevitability. It is built, then analysed with the application of paint, often rearranged, additions and subtractions are made, it is reanalysed with paint that eventually becomes a kind of orchestration of the parts. A single work may be able to accommodate various arrangements of its parts but the conclusion of the making process is indeed a truth, tried and tested.

SI I feel like I encounter with myself deeply. I think the courage is to produce a quality work. Sometimes it’s funny when think about the energy and sweat made but every time I engage that visual process it is like a stimulation. It is about sincerity and the feeling of wanting to make changes in a work, to revisit it until I feel it is ready to leave the studio.

Fatigue is a pleasure. It means satisfactory.

the shape is the picture

Tony Twigg

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Editor Gina Fairley Design Jeffrey Lim / Studio 25 Printer Unico Services Artworks & Images Š 2012 Participating Artists All rights reserved. No part of this catalog may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior consent from the artists and gallery.

TAKSU is a leading contemporary art gallery and specialist in Southeast Asia.

Representing selections of fine art with distinctive urban edge, we are at the forefront of contemporary art in this region. TAKSU works to forge a platform for established and emerging artists to share their pool of creativity and knowledge through its residency programs and exhibitions. Encapsulating the true meaning of the word TAKSU; divine inspiration, energy, and spirit.

Suherwan Abu Director, TAKSU Galleries

DUA: ROUND THE KITCHEN TABLE. A CONVERSATION ON ABSTRACTION SABRI IDRUS & TONY TWIGG

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