KARLA MARCHESI ‘SLOW IS SMOOTH, SMOOTH IS FAST’ REVIEWED IN THE AGE BY TIARNEY MIEKUS

Nicholas Thompson Gallery, until October 21 Within the tremendous visual power of her flora paintings, their vivacity and particularity, Karla Marchesi gives us nature in all its beauty and potential monstrosity. Across 14 oil paintings, the Berlin-based, Brisbane-born artist has created still life floral scenes that have the uncanny shock of a dream. They are delightful but also skewed and mutating. Across a hazy pastel background (Marchesi is a master of using colour to convey a strange sense of weather) is a monumental amalgamation of flowers, petals and leaves. Other paintings depict sprouting growths akin to coral; delicate pansy-like flowers in powerful orange and green-tinged succulents that expand across the canvas. Marchesi is partly referencing the ‘‘impossible bouquet’’ of 17th-century Dutch painting that featured fantastical floral arrangements that could never occur in nature. It seems timely – both hopeful and melancholic – to resurrect this genre. Marchesi shows how nature has its own forms of creation beyond humans, conveying how mighty and inventive this is. Tiarney Miekus