For his third solo exhibition at Kuala Lumpur’s Richard Koh Fine Art, titled “HOL (Higher Order Love), Chapter 1: The Fall,” Malaysian artist Hasanul Isyraf Idris presents a collection of new works on paper inspired by Jewish cemeteries, eternal love, and mathematical theory.These seemingly disparate concepts came together for the artist when he visited a Jewish burial site in Penang and saw the word “HOL” engraved in marble. As the gallery explained in a press release, he interpreted this as the phrase “higher order love,” meaning “eternal love...manifested into an ever-growing and mutating universe fed by memories and sensations of the real world.” When he Googled the mysterious acronym, he hit upon the phrase “higher order logic,” a term to do with the semantics of logic in mathematics. With these two ideas in his mind, he took to paper and created the universe of “HOL.”The exhibition comprises the first 21 works from this series, in which the artist takes moments from his own history growing up — from falling in love to falling off a bike — and draws them in his signature style, creating dense and heavily psychedelic works featuring animals both real and invented, and symbols from faith and religion, as well as the iconography of nature. This movement from the autobiographical to the artistic, from the faithful to the fantastical reflects for the artist how memories are formed and how they “evolve and mutate and eventually transform into a cerebral wilderness similar to a permanent forest reserve.”“HOL (Higher Order Love), Chapter 1: The Fall” runs April 9-23 at Richard Koh Fine Art, in Kuala Lumpur.
↧