Blue Water High

Thick blue paint, spread and dragged with a palette knife, becomes an ocean here. The ridges and grooves left by the blade read as swell lines and breaking crests, and scattered across them are surfers barely bigger than a grain of rice, some paddling out, some standing up, one on a paddleboard cruising through a smoother patch near the bottom edge. Nothing in the painting is actually water. It is all sculpted pigment, and the trick only works because those minuscule figures give the whole surface a sense of scale.

Werner Bronkhorst, born in South Africa and now based in Australia, has built his practice on exactly this joke between the very large and the very small. He lays down slabs of paint first, then studies the shapes they happen to make and adds tiny people who respond to them: hikers on a ridge, swimmers in a pool, surfers in a wave. The title borrows from an Australian teen surf drama, which suits the sunny, unfussy mood. It is a simple idea carried out with real care, and the pleasure of it comes from switching back and forth between seeing paint and seeing a beach on a good day.