BATU BATA: What fades, never disappear

Fazreen trained as a quantity surveyor before he became an artist, and the work in this show, BATU BATA, draws on both. He makes bricks from plaster of Paris, identical in shape to the industrial brick but soft instead of hard, and then he paints and scribbles across their surfaces with acrylic. The scribbles are quick, gestural, almost calligraphic, and they read at first as abstract mark-making. They are also Kelantanese, the dialect Fazreen grew up speaking, set down in a form that hovers between writing and abstraction. A real brick is a unit of construction. Fazreen's plaster brick is something else: a familiar object hollowed of its function, used instead to hold a language that is itself thinning out of daily use. The work places the rigidity of the building site next to the fragility of an inherited tongue.