Flowing lines and powerful energy

JOHN Mawurndjul is a traditional bark painter who renewed interest in this ancient art form when the art world had eyes only for dot painting.

JOHN Mawurndjul is among Australia's best-known Aboriginal artists, a traditional bark painter who renewed interest in this ancient art form when collectors and the art world had eyes only for the more recent style of dot painting.

His work is highly regarded across the world; he is represented in the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris, and has had a retrospective at the Jean Tinguely Museum in Basel. Far from these glamorous addresses, however, Mawurndjul lives near Maningrida in Arnhem Land, and in recent years has moved away from the main community to lead a more traditional existence on an outstation in his family's tribal country.

He spends part of the day hunting and part painting the stories inextricably associated with his surroundings.

Mawurndjul's exhibition at Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne is impressive, especially because the whole room is devoted to works with a common sensibility that one gradually comes to understand.

It should be one of the basic principles of curatorship to assemble things that are alike or different in ways that are subtle and significant.

Works hung together have to be sympathetic if they are to foster attention rather than distraction in the viewer. This is a particular problem when Aboriginal works are hung willy-nilly with European ones.

The aesthetic of Mawurndjul's paintings is a quiet and refined one, yet it is soon apparent that their real theme is energy. He works with natural ochres, so the dominant colours are warm and range from pink to tan, as well as white and black. The ochres are bound in PVA glue, which gives them a lustrous, translucent look, like glazes, while the blacks and whites are flat and opaque.

Compositionally, the works are divided up by a grid or, perhaps more correctly, a net of black lines. Although clearly a structural device, this pattern oddly recalls aerial views of the European countryside divided into a patchwork of rectangular fields; but obviously this reference is foreign both to the land and to Aboriginal culture.

What inclines one to search for some rationale for this reticulation, other than a purely formal one, is that it intersects with the most prominent elements of the symbolic design, the round waterholes that are often the central feature of a given place - they are supposed to be the homes of powerful spirits or even the rainbow serpent - and therefore belong implicitly to the same level of significance.

In addition, there are secondary lines that cross the grid and represent the underground streams that flow invisibly from the billabong and come to the surface as springs of fresh water.

All of this, as so often with Aboriginal painting, is a kind of mapping of the terrain in which topographical features, memories of a mythical past and spiritual significance all coincide.

Important as these elements of the composition are, the most dynamic one resides in what we may think of as the background. This is composed of very fine hatchings, executed, it seems, with some sort of pliable twig, and extending across the whole surface of the painting to the black border.

No emptiness is permitted, no void except in the white oval of the waterhole, and this is part of what endows the barks with a low-key intensity.

The colours of the background hatching (or rarrk) are not only traditional but specifically associated with the artist's family group; the different patterns, used also in body painting during sacred ceremonies, have been compared with clan tartans. In Mawurndjul's case, these colours are black and white as well as background ochre.

Across the composition run bands of white and black in generally ascending curves. And this is where we discover a deeper structural function in the net that divides the composition: the bands are often interrupted at the black lines and continue afterwards slightly offset or out of alignment.

The flow of the lines is broken, but the effect is to evoke bursts of energy, stopping and starting again in successive surges.

And this effect in turn gives a powerful meaning to the points where, on the contrary, the bands flow across the lines without discontinuity; the steady motion of ascent conveys a sense of serenity.

It is in this way that Mawurndjul represents the qualities of a land with which he identifies completely, alive with animistic presences, forces and currents invisible to the eyes of the profane, even if we are not permitted to know the particular stories or rituals that are referred to in these paintings.

It is often galling for contemporary artists to find themselves brushed aside in the rush to admire indigenous authenticity.

But there is a salutary lesson here: contrary to what we are so often told, expressive power comes from tradition, beauty from handwork and authority from belief.