Public Pool

A rectangle of pale blue sits in the middle of a churning field of turquoise, and inside it a dozen tiny people are having a perfectly ordinary afternoon. Someone floats on a pink ring, someone else lies on a yellow lilo, a pair sit together at the edge with their feet in the water. Each figure is no bigger than a fingernail, painted with a fine brush over a surface that has been spread thick with a palette knife. The ridges and swipes of paint around the pool were not smoothed out or hidden, and that is the whole idea: the material stays visible as material, while the little swimmers ask you to read it as water, tile and sky all at once.

Werner Bronkhorst, born in South Africa and based in Australia, has built much of his work around this one playful trick. He lays down slabs of colour that look like cake icing, then drops in miniature skiers, surfers, hikers or bathers who treat the paint as terrain. The joke lands lightly here, since a public pool is already a place of blue rectangles and bodies arranged at random. If you want a detail to hold onto, find the small red-and-white umbrella near the bottom edge, planted on a shore that is really just a thicker smear of blue.