Masa Series: a Reduction Process

Sabri Idrus, a constant researcher in the process of art making, specifically in his endless search in the production of prints, marks and traces as the notion of visual representation, continues his journey with Masa Series – that operate as his medium in conveying his research and thoughts. In this series, the transgression on his interests that involves strong visual presentation and materiality of the object is the result from his previous appreciation on experimenting graphic designs with industrial materials, coupled with the fascination on daily objects that are almost ubiquitous in the practice of everyday life.

Indexically, the process of mark making and layering of colors in this series produced traces of what they signify  – a visual syntax in forming well-formed composition in communicating the subject, which is about movement, time and sequences. The cylindrical-shaped composition signified a set of related events, movement, or things that follow each other in a particular order, repeating and creating sequences and exist as natural temporal ordering. Though sometime it is hard to achieve a complicit agreement on what is being produced by Sabri, we cannot deny that his new works have entered an expanded field that liberated the process of art making into a broader spectrum of art practices.

By combining his previous methods and techniques in combining lines, marks, colors, materials, and sometime mechanical constructions, Masa Series can almost be appreciated as non-referential indices, since they have the quality to be freed from any semantico-referential, but signal some particular value of the process itself. The final objects that are being presented here are the product of communicating ideas into simplified visual products.  

By Hafiz Amirrol