Psalm Palm (living with mice): Mark Maurangi Carrol – Melbourne Art Fair, 2024

Nasha gallery is pleased to present Psalm Palm (living with mice), an exhibition of recent paintings by Mark Maurangi Carrol. The works will be on view at the Melbourne Art Fair, 2024.

Mark Maurangi Carrol’s paintings resemble snapshots from a family photo album, fleeting glimpses of memories, or scenes from a dream that slip from your grasp the more you try to hold onto them. A chorus of anonymous brown-skinned figures in states of action and inaction, tightly cropped and fragmented images, set within ambiguous imagined landscapes, materialising from the canvas in muted, washed-out colours. Carrol frames his practice through the lens of ‘hauntology’ (a portmanteau of ‘haunting’ and ‘ontology’), a term referring to social or cultural memory that lingers in the present like a ghost, first introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Specters of Marx. It is this sense of haunting familiarity and nostalgia in Carrol’s paintings that makes them so alluring.

Born in New South Wales, Carrol and his family moved between city suburbs and regional towns of Australia, and his mother’s birthplace, the Cook Islands (Rarotonga), a Polynesian nation in the Pacific Ocean. Carrol notes that representations of Polynesian culture and people are limited in Australian society. His paintings seek to redress this lack, reflecting upon the amalgamation of disparate cultures through the lens of personal experience and memory. Images of his mother’s country – palm trees, open skies, beaches, and the colourful patterns of Polynesian textiles – are contrasted against images of Australian suburbia – hills hoists, manicured lawns, brick walls, and barbed wire fences. His paintings often explore themes of loneliness, alienation, nostalgia and longing, feelings that may be specific to the diasporic experience, yet are also universally recognised.

In both a conceptual and technical meeting of cultures, Carrol’s innovative painting process is
informed by Pāreu printing, a traditional Polynesian artform, which he learned from his mother and aunts. Borrowing from the process of printing, in which the image is created in reverse, Carrol applies his paint to the reverse side of loom- state linen, letting the pigment soak through the canvas weave to reveal the ghost of an image on the front. The process is somewhat like hinterglasmalerei, the Byzantine practice of painting on the reverse side of glass. The paintings are carefully composed: forms and placement deliberately chosen before being sketched out on the canvas using permanent marker. The imagery is simplified, the forms represented by flat blocks of colour, reminiscent of stained-glass windows. Carrol uses enamel housepaint, instead of specialised fine art oils or acrylics (his father used to work as a house painter so the medium is both familiar and nostalgic), choosing hues that remind him of island life: bright blues, yellows, reds, greens, oranges, pinks and browns – primary and secondary colours that are also reminiscent of the bold patterns of Polynesian Tivaevae and Pāreu textiles. However, Carrol’s technique renders the colours muted, the images losing information and appearing pixelated – like a low-res digital file or a memory that has blurred around the edges.

In Carrol’s paintings, there is a deliberate tension between balance and fragmentation. In the style of religious or renaissance paintings, Carrol uses classical principles, including triangular composition and the rule of thirds, to create a feeling of balance and harmony within the paintings. In contrast, the canvas will often be divided into sections, suggesting fragmentation and division. Walls and fences are a visual metaphor Carrol frequently uses to suggest barriers preventing a transition from one space to another. On occasion he pieces together canvases, either as a diptych (two panels), or a polyptych (multiple panels) – such as in the works river Tiber, who I loved, and swim forever, both paintings from his 2023 exhibition at Nasha Gallery, in which the main figure is split across many panels. He likes to play with scale: a body of work or exhibition will contain different sized paintings, from small intimate works to large-scale scenes. Like a comic book, the multiple cells work together to tell the narrative.

Carrol’s works often play with the slippage of language, evident in the title of this new body of work, ‘Psalm Palm’. Growing up without a link to his mother tongue (Christian missionaries who settled the Cook Islands in the nineteenth century forbade the use of the native language, Te reo Māori Kūki’ Āirani, also known as Cook Island Maori), Carrol is interested in the significance and meaning of words. He mines text from a variety of sources: passages in books, overheard conversations, poems, internet forums and street signs. By taking words and phrases out of context, they become abstracted and can adopt new meanings and associations. It is this openness in Carrol’s approach to his paintings, and the language that accompanies them, that draws the viewer in, offering space for shared collective experience.

Text by Laura Couttie