Khalil Ibrahim: A Continued Dialogue with the Human Form
By Carmen Nge

From the clean, bold lines that vividly capture the undulating rhythms and sensuous sashaying of the female figure to the colourful palette of his later abstract expressionistic work, there is no denying Khalil Ibrahim’s passion for the human form. Titled “A Continued Dialogue,” Khalil Ibrahim’s solo exhibition at the Galeri Petronas at KLCC is testimony to an artist’s singular preoccupation: to depict the visual seductiveness of the human body as it engages with the motions of everyday life and relates to its social and communal existence.

A native of Kubung Krian, Kelantan, Khalil Ibrahim spent his formative years immersed in his enthusiasm for drawing. His penchant for the visual arts was spurred by Saturday art classes with Nik Mahmud Idris, a Malay school art inspector who had received his art education training in Singapore. It is from the latter that Khalil learnt the rudiments of painting. The pastoral setting of kampung life was a common theme for his artistic endeavours at the time and it remained an important subject for his commercial works when Khalil set up his first informal art gallery in Temerloh.

However, the mining of East Coast kampung life as artistic resource for his work did not privilege land and seascapes to the exclusion of its inhabitants. Despite creating landscapes that extol the verdant spectacle of nature and that capture an idyllic space untouched by humans (notably, Pepe-Pepe and Krabi, both works dated 2003), most of Khalil Ibrahim’s work foreground the human form.

In 1959, by way of a scholarship to study at the prestigious St. Martin’s School of Art, Khalil Ibrahim was exposed to formal art education rooted in the European tradition, which emphasized drawings of still life and live models. His exposure to the collections of London galleries and museums drew him to the work of Rubens, which solidified Khalil’s burgeoning interest in the human figure.

Some of Khalil’s post-graduate work from his time in London is on exhibit at the Galeri Petronas. This series clearly reveals his early fascination for the human body. The bold use of colour, the prominence of the body and a lack of emphasis on the face, and the interface between figure and ground inform much of these 1964-65 studies in gouache. Such characteristics are the leitmotifs of his later acrylic paintings.

When asked about his preoccupation with the human body in his work, Khalil Ibrahim explained that to depict kampung women and men necessarily meant paying attention to their human form. Shirtless fishermen and sarong-clad kampung women were an indispensable part of the East Coast iconography of Khalil’s youth and in his effort to capture this visual milieu, since past, he continues to make frequent visits to Southern Thailand, which is not only 90% Malay but continues to resemble 1950s Kelantan.

In one sense, Khalil Ibrahim’s work can be seen as an exercise in nostalgia; it aims to represent the rural simplicity of East Coast kampung life with all of its vibrant local colour and languorous sensuality and none of its ambivalence towards religious and urban encroachment. But because his figures are silhouettes painted in solid, bold, bright colours and set against an indistinguishable backdrop of a similarly vibrant hue, they resist the kind of realism that would fix the work in a specific spatial-temporal context.

In Serangan (Bali) 2002, the bold orange background acts as a stark and arresting visual foil for the solid female figures, which are depicted dancing in a circle. The female forms appear earthy and organic, and the fluid lines capture the sense of motion and the kineticism of their communal activity. Yet, were it not for the title, we would not have been able to place the scene in any particular geographical context. The preponderance of East Coast subjects in Khalil’s paintings makes this particular work, Bali-inspired, indistinguishable from his Malaysian kampung scenes.

There is no denying, however, that the silhouetted form of the human body in works such as Sanur, 1976 and Bebet, 2003 manages to circumvent the controversies attendant to the depiction of the full nude form within the Malaysian context. In Sanur, the bodies are well-defined, with clean lines that clearly demarcate the topless torsos from their clothed lower halves. In Bebet, the sensuality of the women is unabashedly on display through their undulating, flowing bodies and gracefully arching backs. But because all these figures are in silhouette, thereby emphasizing form rather than verisimilitude, the potential sexual energy that is palpable beneath the surface is never fully unleashed. The familiar motif in Khalil Ibrahim’s work, of intertwined bodies of both or either sexes fusing into a pulsating, kinetic whole is curiously devoid of an overt erotic impulse.

Khalil’s sketchbooks, on the other hand, tell a very different story than the one depicted on canvas. While a small number of his sketchbooks are on display in an enclosed case, the pages marked out barely hint at the ways in which all aspects of the human form interest the artist. While leafing through some of them with Khalil, I was privy to a wide selection of nude drawings—both male and female—that were the results of careful study and confident practice. From these initial sketches, some of which laid the groundwork for larger paintings, I began to understand how the silhouetted figures are able to exude an undercurrent of libidinal energy that threatens to disrupt its seemingly benign palette of colour. What the nude sketches illustrate is the necessity of grounding the abstracted, silhouetted form in the tangible human body, from which it ultimately derives.

Even in Khalil’s abstract pieces, such as the Vivacity series (2003), the disappearance of the human figure—from silhouette to shadow to an abstraction that merely hints at the presence of a figure—cannot entirely eliminate the throbbing sense of movement and vitality that pervades the works. His use of colour is vital in these abstract pieces because, when considered together with his earlier more figurative work, they suggest the presence of the human form. The bright orange, green and yellow silhouettes are now fragmented shards of colour, interspersed among varying tones of blues that remind us of the seascapes dominating his visual field.

It is perhaps with these later abstract works that one begins to question the direction Khalil Ibrahim is likely to take his passion for the figurative. If the villages of Malaysia’s East Coast continue to occupy a central place in his artistic imagination, it is perhaps opportune for him to consider how his artistic practice can be shaped by such imaginings in their current context. To revisit the same themes and motifs need not entail a sense of fidelity to what has been done before; ultimately, for the artwork to remain vibrant, its continued dialogue with the past must be shaped, though not constrained, by what has come before.

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This article was published in the April 2004 issue of Options2, The Edge