In Faris Heizer’s third solo exhibition with Cuturi Gallery, a gust of wind blows, the smell of cigarettes lingers, and his woolly colours swirl with a life of their own. The young artist paints a defamiliarised yet distinctly recognisable heartland landscape. Each painting serves as an aperture through which we peek into Heizer’s wider, whispery world. Two sets of paintings, possibly pendants, portray contiguous spaces: the man lost in a daydream in Birdsong might have walked over to a blue bench for a cigarette in Chain Smoker, and if you round the corner of Man and Mouse, you might meet The Man Who Eventually Moved.
For Heizer, colour embodies sensation, translated through experience. His purplish reds, deep ochres, and pale greens are expressions of an inner emotional landscape, or what the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl called Stimmung, or mood, defined by elements of restfulness and far-sightedness. Hold On depicts a man buffeted by strong wind, enveloped by airborne leaves. The chiastic composition, intensified by Heizer’s characteristic use of perspectival distortion and foreshortening, renders the loose-limbed protagonist larger than life. Thin, white wisps of paint emanate from the figure, almost as if he were evaporating into the environment. Reflecting the physical experience of the slippered man, Heizer blends the sitter and the setting into one. In this regard, he works within the tradition of Expressionist painters like Edvard Munch and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
Heizer’s breezy paintings soften reality and blur the edges between things, evoking what the poet Louise MacNeice called “the drunkenness of things being various.” This gauzy, vaporous quality of his paintings results, in part, from his use of thin, dry brushstrokes on barely primed linen canvases, which he exclusively favours over cotton. His technique modulates the harshness of fluorescent street lighting to the warmth of tungsten.
Though his work has been described as dream-like, it’s not divorced from reality. Through his eyes, pigeons, wooden benches, and crushed cans become everyday icons invested with emotional amplitude. Heizer is particularly enamoured with the interplay of light and shade and the long, overlapping shadows cast through red plastic stools and an HDB’s squared window grill onto the face of slumbering man. Home Plant presents this pleasure in perception with serene delight: the shrub’s shadow stretches to tickle the edges of the frame. By painting this negative presence, he draws attention to the solid, often unnoticed facts of everyday existence. Or to put it differently, Heizer intimates how our existence expands through our shadows.
Beyond the shadows that allude to objects both within and without the painting, Heizer shows us our physical imprint on this world. He literalises the ghostly, outlined silhouette of a man on a bench in the exhibition’s titular painting through the installation Last Legs. A real, three-dimensional bench intrudes in Cuturi Gallery’s pristine white cube, grounding The Man Who Eventually Moved in reality. It invites us to consider the perspective of the shirtless man who has sat on the bench for so long that the wooden planks are indented on his back. The work expands to become the world — we are now encompassed in Heizer’s lonely universe.
To appreciate his sensibilities, we might compare a few contemporary Singaporean figurative painters of the everyday. Unlike Yeo Tze Yang, who sings the heartlands electric in saturated colour and oils, or Casey Tan’s surreal, nervous melodrama, Heizer’s production is lo-fi, or a kind of blues. Even though his sitters are often isolated, or inhabiting a world of their own, he directs a compassionate gaze to his slouching and lurching figures. This sympathy even extends to the mice in a void deck, who appear as unobtrusive companions. In his drawing By the Bin, a man slumps against a rubbish bin. While this figure might elicit a look askance in real life, Heizer instead grants him a quiet, contemplative dignity here, as if he were a latter-day Diogenes.
In his largest painting in the exhibition, The Show Must Go On, an avatar of the artist stands tall and asserts himself like a Soviet monument amid a scene of lassitude. Resolute and heroic, he holds the strings of the guitar in his hand as if in the act of restringing the instrument. The orange sky exemplifies the temporal atmosphere in Heizer’s paintings, often either the early morning of Gentle Alarm, or the late evening of Returning Home. Yet, it’s also the liquid, undefined time of a reverie. We cannot sit on the park bench forever — we must eventually move — but Heizer suggests that lingering in the soft interim is not a bad place to be.
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“Faris Heizer Sings the Blues” is the winner of the Plural x AGAS Singapore Gallery Month Art Writing Contest. Congratulations to Alex Foo for his winning entry, and our thanks to all the participants for their wonderful reviews!
The Man Who Eventually Moved ran at Cuturi Gallery from 14 September – 19 October 2024 as part of Singapore Gallery Month.
Header image: Installation view with The Man Who Eventually Moved (left; 2024, acrylic on linen, 183 x 156 cm) and Man and Mouse (right; 2024, acrylic on linen, 80 x 60 cm).
