Galeri Sasha is pleased to present Runut, Fauzan Fuad’s (b. 1987, Kuala Lumpur) fourth solo exhibition and his first solo presentation with the gallery, featuring a new body of paintings that traces the marks, residues and material changes embedded within Kuala Lumpur’s urban landscape.
Beyond the serene and surprisingly quiet grounds of a cemetery lies a decades-old apartment block. Situated just outside the city centre, the building appears isolated from the dense parts of Kuala Lumpur. The hillside and its lush natural facade produce a sense of concealment, of being tucked away from prying eyes. This is the home studio where Fauzan Fuad produces his work. “I wanted to find a place where I can hide myself from the ruckus of the city, within the city.”
Runut is the accumulation of Fauzan Fuad’s artistic practice, encompassing his lived experience and his sustained observation of material change in his surroundings. He navigates the city through its nooks and crannies. Marks left by screeching tyres, rusty fences, narrow streets under faded advertising boards, graffiti: all sights familiar to him. Runut traces the logic behind these markings. Fauzan positions himself as an observer while being part of the mark itself. The surroundings serve as a recording of human conduct.
Fauzan works from the ground, in both senses of the word: the street he walks and the surface he prepares. Runut becomes his way of translating that structural vocabulary into familiar similes. The Malay word, which translates directly as “track” or “trail,” actually holds a deeper meaning that the English word can’t fully capture. It encompasses the psyche behind local interactions. Runut describes the mark left by someone or something, a sign that creates a path, leading to trails. It’s a verb before it’s a noun, emphasising the act of trailing and acknowledging encounters with livelihoods that once thrived in these spaces. The index points, but it’s the trail that really guides us.
Runut builds on Fauzan’s continuous exploration of the nature of space, of how it’s utilised and how memories of it linger in its traces. These themes travelled with him. What changes in Runut is the focus of the inquiry: instead of asking what space is, it asks what remains of the people who have moved through it. The latest series is a convergence of his usual visual language, which centres on four registers: impermanent space, industrial materials, geometrical composition, and indexical mark-making. Tactility runs through the surfaces, the source of the artist’s fascination, and the surface remains his abiding subject: a reflection of the city. Each canvas adheres to a near-monotone field, and a geometry drawn from built surfaces gives the field its order. Over that order, the spontaneous, gestural marks arrive.
The same structure operates inside the process, where control and chaos meet as method. Geometry supplies the control: the measured field and the vertical incision. The repetition of technique mimics automated machinery, and the materials carry the logic of industrialisation. Gesture supplies the chaos. Marks are laid down and buried, then partially recovered. Layers accumulate and are cut back into. A passage is worked and abandoned, and he returns to it later. The surfaces are built from industrial paint, acrylic and polyvinyl acetate on canvas, through staining, rubbing, monoprinting, scraping, covering and uncovering. Plastic, paper, cardboard, mesh, any material capable of carrying texture, become transfer devices, and the roller, borrowed from printmaking, presses and records.
- Exhibition text by Azzad Diah