Horseplay

A single horse and rider gallop across what looks like an endless field of snow, except that snow is really just paint. Werner Bronkhorst, an Australian artist working out of Melbourne, builds his backgrounds by dragging thick oil paint across the surface with a palette knife, letting the ridges, drags and scrape marks do the work of hills, drifts and tracks. Then he drops in one tiny, carefully rendered figure. The trick works because of the shadow: that small dark shape running alongside the horse convinces your eye that the paint is ground, and suddenly the whole canvas becomes a landscape seen from a helicopter.

Bronkhorst has built a whole body of work on this idea, with surfers, skiers, cyclists and swimmers scattered across seas of white and grey impasto. Critics sometimes file him under contemporary minimalism, though the spirit is closer to visual play than to any movement. The title says as much. Up close, the horse is barely larger than a thumbnail, with the jockey's blue silks the only real colour in the picture, and the whole thing depends on the gap between how detailed that little figure is and how rough and unfinished everything around it stays. Whether you read the white as snow, sand or simply as paint is left entirely to you.