Some Things Last a Long Time: Israfil Ridhwan

Cuturi Gallery proudly presents Some Things Last a Long Time by Israfil Ridhwan (b.1999, Singapore). Curated by Louis Ho, this exhibition marks his third solo show with the gallery. Israfil Ridhwan’s latest series of paintings are an insight into an intimate reflection, filled with personal vignettes and filmic moments.

 

Israfil’s visual syntax may be understood as drawing on the lineage of queer representation, and its codes, in art history and filmic language. By his own admission, his latest series of paintings commemorates a phase of his life that is ebbing – a phase marked by relationships and encounters that prove ultimately unfulfilling. The autobiographical character of his work, read within the context of LGBTQ visual culture, is shot through with a referentiality that commemorates the queer vocabularies of canvas and screen. 

 

The engagement with cinema, for one, is discernible in his compositional strategies. The paintings in the current show present a series of personal vignettes almost in the manner of filmic moments, with the artist relaying on the analogy to the moving image to characterize one of their most striking formal qualities: “When I look at my works, I’d like to imagine a camera panning out like in the movies as the subject/subjects do what they do.” 

 

Take Epilogue (2025), for instance. The only solo portrait in the exhibition portrays a figure – who appears to vaguely resemble an older version of Israfil himself – caught in the throes of doleful reflection. The wealth of details in the composition immediately suggests an entire narrative universe summed up in a single instant: the unexplained locks of hair and a pair of scissors, suggesting a recent snip (a reaction to heartbreak or an unusual act of self-care, perhaps); the smartphone on the toilet seat playing Serge Gainsbourg’s “La Chanson de Prévert”, a tune that mourns lost love. That this tableau could have been a painterly recreation of a particular scene from a movie may well be imagined, a synecdochical split second of solitary sadness. 

 

The intertextuality of Israfil’s pictorial language is also attested to by references to art history. The pair of bodies seemingly engaged in a wrestling match in Card Player (2025) is a dramatization of a one-sided relationship that he once endured, the entanglement ending only when he caught the other party with someone else. The incongruous playing cards tucked into the waistband of a pair of underpants are a direct citation of Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps (c. 1595) – the cards are similar down to their suits, clubs and hearts – transforming the act of swindling depicted in the earlier painting into the aftermath of romantic dishonesty.  Elsewhere, the guilt, anger and shame that the artist experienced as a teenager, during a series of encounters with a neighbour, is clearly communicated in the eyes of the figure in green in Conversations with Mr. Guilt (2025). 

 

Some Things Last a Long Time will be on view at 61 Aliwal Street, S199937, from 12 April – 17 May 2025.