2021 #ROADTRIP by Maree Azzopardi

Maree Azzopardi’s recent paintings plot the impact of the Australian landscape on the artist, both emotionally and spiritually, and the idea of taking a journey from the bush to the outback, both real and imagined. Initially her works were created in response to the destruction of the Black Summer Fires. Her “fire-works” in black and gold are created from different strata of paint, charcoal, Sumi Japanese ink and lacquer. In such paintings as “I Heard The Earth Praying”, gilded texts emerge from the highly textured surfaces, while painterly details focus on the regenerative nature of wattle. The paint is sometimes as coarse as a hessian sack, with angular elements including wire fences, burnt branches and budding leaves.

While Azzopardi’s more minimal landscapes represent what she calls “the expansive nothingness of the outback”, her sparse paintings of horizons and highways suggest their own narratives, made up from many layers of pale terracotta, dusty pink and skin-tones. In some of her latest paintings, Azzopardi views the landscape from above. Her birds-eye panoramas show meandering rivers, ridges and bush tracks. It is as though she is creating her own topographical map of emotions, documenting the natural processes of recovery after loss, and healing through dreams.

Flirting with abstraction, Maree Azzopardi unveils a series of new canvases and landscapes on paper, in a journey away from her well-known photographic works. Created over the past year and keeping pace with the successive waves of isolation, these outdoor scenes are drenched in a nature bubbling over with revitalized life. Formal aspects centre on empty and filled space, on shadow and light, on rich gold and cavernous black. She uses her paintings to explore the shifting contemporary perception of the most ordinary features in our abstracted environment, from views of burnt-out bushland to deserted highways with white lines on baked asphalt. Azzopardi questions our relationship to the image and the capacity for painting to transcend our vision of an increasingly uniform world. The crushed, smeared, scratched and scraped surfaces she works on, similar to skin, reveal unexplored detours on her horizons. Each canvas in #ROADTRIP becomes an examination of the purpose of painting, the role it plays in the long pictorial tradition, and its ability to represent and enchant the world.  (Jonathan Turner)