All The Things I Now Only Just Understand

By Andrew Frost

Painting as a kind of ‘thinking-through’ is Tonee Messiah’s great artistic adventure. Her paintings are curious collections of images – faces, bodies, flowers and landscapes – sensuously threaded together into great thought-bubbles of experience and emotional states. Using oils on canvas and watercolours and mixed media on paper, Messiah’s latest show at Gallery 9 All The Things I Now Only Just Understand has a uniting theme, the exploration of “…hindsight and the clarity and beauty it grants delivering perspective from a safe distance.”

Although this theme may not be readily apparent to the viewer, the paintings have their own attractive logic that melds together biomorphic shapes with more definitive objects: Imagined Memo for the Future [2012] is a black map-like shape that morphs into a vase; Emasculated Green and Soft Pink [2012] marries a melting face with swathes of colour that might hint at something profane, while Your Currency [2012] merges faces, figures and colour. Thinking-through is a ongoing process and Messiah’s subtly powerful paintings are sign posts in land of unique logic.

Until October 6.

Gallery 9, Darlinghurst.

www.gallery9.com.au

Pic: Tonee Messiah, Your Currency, 2012 oil and enamel on linen 122 x 112 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gallery 9.