When artists traditionally depict nature, they paint great natural landscapes, producing canvas celebrating nature in its opulence, in its abundant colours, producing beautiful or sublime pictures of seaside, forests, mountains, which, in Western Art History at least, would always resonate with the Biblical theme of the Lost Paradise.

Faizal Suhif on the other hand, whose atelier is located in Hulu Langat in the countryside, has a very different approach to nature. He focuses on the very small things, the microscopic elements of nature one usually overlooks, and magnifies them by turning them into big canvas. The seeds, bees, crops, mushrooms, roots and spiders which flourish in his imagination become the center of his Microscopia. In “Hidup Merumpun”, for example, a mushroom originally the size of a finger suddenly morphs into a 2-meters high canvas. It is as if the spectator would look in a microscope and suddenly all the details of its intriguing form appear to us which our bare eye wouldn’t be able to see normally.

Faizal is a printmaker, who graduated at the UiTM. The majority of his artworks are prints. Faizal often does what he calls extended printing where he places his canvases on rocks, tree barks, and “prints” nature itself. Like a geologist, he collects visual samples of nature. Often, we can guess the material of the original background depicted on the canvas. Is it a rock, a bark, moos, the soil itself? In a certain way, they all look similar.

For someone like Faizal, who lives and works amongst the trees and the farmlands, who is used to helping his father working in the fields, the force and mystery of Nature lies in its smallest elements. A series of diptychs’ showcases a simple seed, in all its modesty, but over-scaled and morphed into a 2-meter diameter orb floating in an almost abstract background. The seed suddenly looks like a transmuting planet, maybe a tiny version of Earth itself. The artists play with scales reminds us of the relativity and the similarity which exists in the different layers of the cosmos. Small seeds planted in a farmland look like planets in the galaxy, atoms in the subatomic realm, cells in an organism, waterdrops in the ocean, stars in the void. As per design, the microscopic reflects the macroscopic – or maybe it is the other way around, and the macroscopic scale is merely a reflection of the microscopic world, where it all begins?

The romantic European painters and poets look for God in the mighty manifestations of the natural world. The Wanderer would climb the highest mountains, cross the darkest forests, travel the oceans, witness storms and breath-taking landscapes, reflecting on the human condition in front of the unchained forces of nature. Faizal is no Wanderer, he is the son of a Farmer and as such, he is impregnated with the virtue of those who are used to listen to the calm and steady ways of nature. When he paints a landscape, which often in Faizal’s work are scorched lands and burned down forest, he always depicts little seeds or flowers or plants which are already growing amidst the ashes.

He calls the seed of Hope” hiding beneath the soil, which one day will bring a bountiful harvest. But to work with nature requires patience, steadiness, sheer commitment. It requires to work within the repetitive cycle of seeding, growing and harvesting while adapting to a rhythm that is very different rhythm than the fast pace of our modern world.

Faizal’s artistic work is based on this rhythm. His auto-portrait is entitled “Diam, Diam”, which means something like slowly, steadily, calmly. It depicts the artist laying, maybe sleeping and resting after a long day of labour, amidst a forest. The way the shape of his body is slowly morphing into tree lines reminds the vegetal portraits of Arcimboldo. The graphic movement originates in his mind, on the left side, and the more the drawing progresses to the right, the more emptiness there is on the canvas until leaving a completely void. This dynamic layout suggests a movement, and also a timeline: the artistic process originates in the present and slowly fills the blank future, full of possibilities, one drawing after another, step by step. Because the portrait of the artist is merely a sketch and his face not fully recognizable, there is some room for interpretation and one could see mother nature itself lying there, slowly and steadily morphing the hills and the forests in her dreams, reinforcing this idea that Faizal is imitating Nature in his process. A look at his impressive career, the number of works and exhibitions he already produced show that Faizal is consistently guided by his principles.

Faizal is a daydreamer and a poet. He is no conceptual artist, nor is he a demiurge persona who creates a world on his own, ex nihilo. He wanders in natural surroundings, observes the pattern on tree, barks, and rocks. He listens to the fish, and the bee, and watches seeds grow over the seasons. His inspiration comes from his environment. It deeply resonates within him, and his imagination is used to investigate and extend those hidden shapes and forms he witnesses around him. Like an archaeologist, he is searching the soil, the barks, the flowers, seeking their connection to the Universe, highlighting their presence in the Cosmos. His work is also heavily influenced by the words and often contain references to the Al-Qu’ran, Malay poets and traditional proverb, whether it be in the titles or on the canvas itself, as he often discreetly writes down on his prints. The wisdom of those powerful words are added to the gentle and deep images he creates, enhancing even further his visual poetry.

Faizal is very clear that his artistic activity is a labor, that it requires hard work, discipline and technical skills he needs to perfect every day, he also indicates that it is a spiritual journey. When asked him why he was fascinated with printmaking, a rather underrated artform especially in Malaysia, he refers to the almost meditative aspect of the processualism required in printmaking. Stacing, penciling and printing. And then doing it all over again. Maybe more so than painting or other major artistic disciplines, it feels like a repetitive work with strong technical requirements, where one has to negotiate with tools, machines, processes, and materials Printmaking is a very humbling activity, says Faizal. One understands quick why he was drawn to this specific medium.

Constatin Beck

Assistance Curator & Writer