Swing

A single scoop of avocado green paint sits on a flat field of the same colour, spread and curled like frosting on a cake, and somewhere near the middle of it hangs a person about the size of a fingernail. She is swinging from a rope, legs kicked out, casting a tiny shadow on the paint below her. That shadow is the trick that makes the whole thing work: it turns a smear of pigment into a cliff face, a hillside, a place with weather and gravity.

Werner Bronkhorst is a contemporary Australian painter who has built a whole practice out of this one idea. He lays down thick slabs of paint with knives and trowels, letting the ridges and drips fall where they will, then paints minuscule figures onto the surface who treat the result as terrain. People ski down it, abseil off it, sit on its edges with their feet dangling. The joke is simple and it holds up, because paint really does look like landscape when you shrink the viewer enough.

The palette here is doing quiet work too. Everything is one colour, so there is nothing to look at except texture and scale, which is exactly what the painting is about. Bronkhorst has spoken about wanting his work to be enjoyed rather than decoded, and this one keeps its promise. Find the swinger, register the drop below her, and the flat green wall suddenly has a horizon.