This geometric painting is one of seventy-eight painted panels that were arranged on the walls of Haffendi Anuar’s 2015 installation, Elephant Utopia. It comprises a series of geometrical shapes in blue, pink, crimson, and green tones which are combined and repeated onto a square grid. This grid consists of four distinct patterns that are each repeated four times horizontally across the composition. The painting appears to have been constructed from a base layer of stippled blue paint, which was then concealed in areas with strips of tape. The blank spaces were painted over to form the triangular shapes in each square, after which the tape was removed to reveal the base layer underneath, hence forming the painting’s blue intersecting grid lines. 

Anuar’s exploration of standard proportions and geometry first appeared in his first solo exhibition in 2013, entitled M13 at Richard Koh Fine Art gallery in Kuala Lumpur. In this prior series, a combination of paintings inspired by the Constructivist abstraction and object-based works were employed as indirect representations of Kuala Lumpur’s urban structures. His goal was to create an environment in which the visitor could simulate an alternative experience of the flâneur, who wanders a city without a predetermined goal or destination. The Elephant Utopia (2015) series was a continuation of this theme, this time organised along the gallery walls as modular panels in the shape of an abstract city skyline. Elephant Utopia built on the ideas of M13 by exploring not just the experience of walking through the city itself, but more specifically the forms that populate the city’s more deprived urban areas. The formal language of modernism (flatness and repetition), in combination with the geometries of Islamic art, were the artist’s principal entries into this landscape. Anuar believed they could verbalise the grill works veiling most doors and windows in the poorer neighbourhoods of Kuala Lumpur in which his studio was situated. Elephant 13 and its counterparts were the artist’s attempts to bridge the idea of modern progress with its reality of inequality, alluding to the facade of progress in the developing city through flashy symbols that are ultimately empty in meaning.