The Champions

Scattered across this field of thick green paint are tiny people, each one barely bigger than a fingernail. Once you spot them, the whole surface changes meaning. What looked like a pile of palette knife swipes suddenly reads as rolling fairways, grassy slopes and shaded hollows, with figures wandering across them as if out for a round of golf on a very strange course. Werner Bronkhorst, a painter born in South Africa and based in Australia, built his reputation on exactly this trick: he lays down slabs of oil paint with a knife, lets the ridges and drag marks do the work of hills and snowfields, then adds minuscule humans to give the whole thing scale.

The fun of it is that the paint never stops looking like paint. You can see the knife's edge in every stroke, the way the colour smears from deep olive to pale sage where the blade lifted. Bronkhorst does not hide the process, he just asks you to read it two ways at once. The title nods toward sport, though the champions here are anonymous specks, lost in terrain made of the very material that depicts them. Artists have played with illusion and scale for centuries, but this version feels closer to a good joke than a grand statement, and it works better for it.