“In my life there are many silences; in my writing too…”
Juan Rulfo

Often, and time and again, as I witnessed the making of the ‘heroisms’ that comprise My God Is My Truck: Heroic Portraiture From the Far Side of Paradise, I would return to Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, one of the novels I love best, to be consciously struck by it’s spectral, first lines:
“I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Paramo, lived there. It was my mother who told me. And I had promised her that after she dies I would go see him. I squeezed her hands as a sign I would do it. She was near death and I would have promised her anything…”

Perhaps it was the very reference to Comala, a sound that lends itself to countless other assonances, place names that resonate in the past explored in these paintings; or to more recent journeyings’ – to Trincomalee, Galle, a small town in Wales, even a once loathed Klang, now renewed and rediscovered – that had compelled them, nurtured their colours, the drips and spills. Or perhaps it was the perennial search for the proverbial father, at the behest of a mother, now passing into myth. Or, simply the lines, “I would have promised her anything…” – the sensibility of yearning that pervades the entire spirit of My God Is My Truck.

This self-professed nostalgist, Anurendra – our contemporary mythmaker – has ardently striven, in work after work, to weave a world of the past that remains pristine and untainted by the encumbrances of the present.(my parent’s with beer bottle) Yet, in the face of the vagaries of contemporary history and politics, increasingly brittle, fragile and vulnerable is the sensibility that permeates it. True, his struggle has always been to reanimate that “promise of anything…” suitably embellished with humour, memory and all the bric-a-brac gathered from a life’s comfort as if to carve, in his work and for himself, a veritable haven. His essential expression has, so far, been one of heightened bemusement and ambivalence of a world in transformation – erratic transformation – around him.

History, however, abjures benevolence and ridicules all notions of a haven; for, as once encapsulated, history remains, fundamentally, the sum of all our misunderstandings. This realisation, catalysed by events enveloping the artist induces another significant departure.

With My God is My Truck (even in the imagery conveyed by the title)comes, almost literally, the weight of history – personal and political – as a stark, if at times, begrudging affirmation of that truth. Even the characteristic melancholy, the sustained hallmark of an Anurendra painting, is inspired now by a mood rooted in stillness and silence, like the figures that hover in his assembly of devotees or the balmy blue that accompanies his walk with the Tamil poets. The labyrinth of fable remains apparent still, but here it is replete with the absurdities and paradoxes that not just intrude, but bear heavy, upon his vision of an idealised life.

Where previously the works of J. Anurendra lent themselves to a celebration of the iconic – especially of popular imagery – there is now apparent, in My God Is My Truck, a crisis of belief in all the received comforts of this artist’s privileged place and class. A reinterpretation of the very nature (and assault) of iconography ensues, with its astute play on social realism and a deeper comprehension of the subliminal nature of the image in all its hagiographic allusions. A gallery of Prime Minister portraits, Aung Sun Suu Kyi, Anwar Ibrahim, the perennial thorn, convey, even in gaze, the act of demythologizing the icon and humanising the image.

The principal theme pervading My God Is My Truck is, nevertheless, the struggle induced by a crisis of belonging. The times, here in present day Malaysia, have come to be characterised by the undulations of a play resembling the finest in an absurdist drama. Calls for Idi Amin style ‘returns to homeland’ of historical minority communities, parades with cow heads, desecration with boar heads, temple destructions, church burnings, the historical roles of minority communities effaced from formal/national histories – a social experiment of nationhood fraying at the seams.

Anurendra, being the consummate ‘painter of politics, not a political painter’ grapples with this confrontation with history in the most personalised and tragic perspective – the autobiographical.(legend of the sitting elephant)
“Of all forms of heroism,” the poet Michael Hofmann says, “families are the most heroic, but that doesn’t make it any easier to relish them as heroes.” And as such, a severed cow’s head is presented as A Portrait of my Father as a Cow’s Head juxtaposed with A Portrait of my Mother as the Queen.

Everywhere, too, is the artist’s daughter, the subject of our tentative future placed alongside photographs of antecedents, with their proud expressions and tenacious demeanours. Brought close to home, and as a refraction of the history of immigration that has forged contemporary Malaysia and where, centuries on, ‘homeland’ is still never quite far, the artist delves with the civil war in Sri Lanka, again with an astute and subversive hand on the pulse of iconography to explore the theme of historical accident, as aunts metamorphose into Tamil Tiger guerrilla’s.
Everywhere in these paintings are allusions to family – cousins, uncles, friends of family– at once talismanic, tragic and torn.(Uncle Khoo painting)

The magnitude in theme and temperament is evident in the ever more ambitious aspect of artistic treatment. Increasingly larger works by the artists, on ever larger canvasses, embellished now with temple decorations, symbols and eccentric motifs reflect the chaos, not just of representation, but also of the evocation of aesthetic form. Split colours, drips and spills forming mottles, red upon yellow are at once terrible and wonderful things to witness. For in all this paintings is the sense…clear sense…of us witnessing the aftermath of something.

Within a contemporary artistic context of fixed attitudes and firm artistic positions, fixated on questions about the meaning of form, on tiring (and purposeless) questions regarding the viability of painting, the relevance of the figure in contemporary art, on art, identity and nation…the stuff, in the words of the artist of ‘post colonial baggage,’ My God is My Truck will settle, as the preceding exhibition Conditional Love did, as an anomaly, with its disposition of moral suspension, curious treatment of iconography, its celebration of the human figure and it’s assertion of the autobiographical as a legitimate voice in history.

But anomalies remain marvelous things; the human figure is still a capacious and vast subject full of extraordinary possibilities, painting still a practice to be distinguished from the hanging of a urinal, and autobiography – the life contemplated and lived, perhaps the most authentic voice in history. All of this true, and evident in My God Is My Truck, especially in this, our age, at the Far Side of Paradise.