Chef de Mulu

Named after the eponymous place in Kelantan (Malaysia), Chef de Mulu condenses in Labok not a topographic map but a climate: a grey, transverse band can be read as a road, alongside shadowy rectangles like building edges. Naturalism is deliberately refused. Dense fields of red and magenta, layered with energetic brushwork, convey the oppressive heat; cooler blues and turquoises seep into the warm strata and make the humidity palpable.

Stylistically the work sits in gestural abstraction and can be described as abstract-expressionist; at points with tachist accents—visible in the speckled, spontaneously placed passages where paint runs, scratches, and mingles. Its force comes not from smooth color fields but from roughened, interlocking zones and the warm–cool contrast that makes temperature and sultriness immediately tangible.

Thus Labok becomes a subjective topography—a memory map of color, temperature, and atmospheric density. Chef de Mulu translates impressions of a typical Malaysian place into a sensorial register: the weight of the heat, the moisture of the air, and the charged surface, far from any naturalistic depiction.