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home > art > former resident artists |
renee kraal |
'Quantum Leap,' 150 x 100cm, oil on canvas, 1995
'Jungle Scream,' 40cm x 28cm, Acrylic and oil on paper
'Primal Scream,' 100cm x 150cm, Oil on canvas
'Tree Hug,' 100cm x 150cm, oil on canvas
'Vibrations,' 100cm x 150cm, oil on canvas |
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103
Taman Bukit Raya Maps
of Transitions Appearance
and disappearance. Form and
de-form. Structure and 'dis-structure'.
Sight and insight. The
paintings of Renee Kraal seem to inhabit these realms of tensions.
The realm between Being and Nothingness. Meanings obtain only in the dialectical relationships between
states of consciousness. An
art that thrives on the awareness of the necessity of forms while simultaneously
intent on the possibilities of formlessness.
Conscious formlessness and formless consciousness. This
mode of artistic creation, of course, has always been important in modernist
painting traditions, given the preoccupation with intuition, the subconscious,
the spiritual, dreams and what not, of early European modernists, and
also in the covert 'action' and 'freedom' of American Abstract Expressionists.
In Symbolism, Expressionism, Surrealism. or even Impressionism
with its interest in the effects of transitory light on the perception
of forms, at various times either extreme dominates artistic production,
giving free rein either to conscious disorder or unconscious order.
At other times, ambivalence takes over, or as could be appreciated
in Kraal's works, a sense of emergence and submergence of both seems to
rule the life in flux of the subject matter. It
would not do, however, to identify her works with just one of the modernist
labels, because interestingly, the works are at once symbolic, expressionistic,
surrealistic, and impressionistic, and more.
The works do not convey the artist's message as much as the 'message'
conveys the artist. It is
not difficult to imagine that the artist is quite essentially immersed
in the works, journeying freely within the terrains of the subconscious.
The paintings then become intriguing maps of these journeys, topographies
of Freudian signs and Jungian de-signs. Whatever
title is affixed to a painting, whether it be Joy, Energy, Vibrations,
Mental/Emotional Physical Bodies,
Levitation, Mask,
Nature or even Secret Music
of Plants, they are all Primal
Screams of sorts. The
forms and colours do not merely describe the essential external world,
but express profoundly an inner pathos alluding to an aesthetic of pathology
that is neither pathetic nor pathological.
On the contrary, the allusion reminds us of the inscrutable aspects
of human life and the universe.
When Kraal says that 'it's troublesome to be human', it is not
just a whimsical platitude. From
looking at her works it is the ever-shifting boundaries between visible
reality and invisible sensibility, the fluid tension of, and in life,
to which she refers. Kraal's
maps of transitions aptly appropriate the Greenbergian modernist idiom
with a twist. The flatness
that predominates Greenberg's theory of modernist painting while offering
aesthetic meaning to Kraal's work does not overpower the artist's insights
about life. Kraal is not
limited by total subservience to formalistic concerns as is demanded from
the Greenbergian reduction of painting to painting.
She does not shy away from revealing allusions to pictorial recession. Nor does she intentionally restrict her painterly explorations
to considerations of properties of painting as art, as propounded by Greenberg.
In fact, just as they inhabit the realms of tension and transition,
Kraal's paintings derive from and defy the Greenbergian canon.
They operate as painting as art, and as windows to the outer and
inner worlds. The medium
does not just define her paintings as art, it is also the vehicle in her
journeys to somewhere and nowhere, between the conscious and the unconscious. In
the context of Malaysian art, Kraal's paintings show affinity with many
Malaysian artists, in as much as many Malaysian artists' mode of creation
exhibit a tendency to explore the aesthetic possibilities of the indefiniteness
of forms and contents. Sometimes
the pictorial context is reminiscent of unlocatable landscapes, as in
Latiff Mohidin's Pago-Pago paintings or Syed Ahmad Jamals' Gunung Ledang.
Kraal's enigmatic figures and forms are often depicted against
and within a landscape context, projecting the inner psychological and
spiritual worlds into the more physical outer world, or vice versa, a
mode of artistic expression also seen in the abstract or abstracted landscapes
populated by barely perceptible bare torsos painted by Yeoh Jin Leng,
Joseph Tan and Ibrahim Hussein.
But more clearly, Kraal's painting show closer affinity with the
worlds of Ali Mabuha and the much younger Anna Chin, especially in the
projection of psychological states into the physical landscapes.
Perhaps because of this, the artists' worlds cannot just be described
as inaccessible by their being highly personal or that the artists are
not concerned about the external and the real social world.
Perhaps, our appreciation of this kind of work would be all the
more meaningful if we regard the indeterminable landscapes as metaphors
of commentary about society and the environment.
With the works of Kraal, our contextual appreciation of them in
this regard could take an existential view point.
The individual could be seen as having to exist and struggle within
the dialectical relationship between personal hopes and environmental
determination. He or she
has to realise the reality of this existence that does not always offer
a clear demarcation between concrete graspable reality and the no less
concrete but ephemeral unconscious.
Kraal's works map out this realm of transition.
In this she shows quite an exceptional level of artistic sincerity
and conviction. Surely in
these times of unbridled commodification of artistic productions, such
a quality ranks high as a criterion for critical regard. Zainal
Abidin Ahmad Shariff
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