Wayfinding – A Painter’s Path

Spectacular, sweeping landscapes from the latest series by Carly Le Cerf are available to preview and acquire by request ahead of the acclaimed West Australian contemporary painter’s highly anticipated solo exhibition, Wayfinding – A Painter’s Path, which opens this month at Michael Reid Sydney and is her first show in our flagship space in more than two years.

Epic in scale and emotional heft, Le Cerf’s new series charts a painterly odyssey across our sunburnt country and casts the viewer into richly textured aerial terrain. Immersive, horizonless landscapes sprawl across vast canvases, enveloping the body in earth, memory and lyricism. “The original idea was simple,” recalls Le Cerf. “Create pieces so immersive that when you stand in front of them, your whole body is held by the land – no sky, just earth – inviting a full-body experience of stillness and immersion.”

Wayfinding is at once a cartographic meditation and an emotional topography – mapping not only land traversed but inner routes forged through experience and intuition. “These aerial encaustic landscapes are threaded with stark tracks and rupture,” says the artist. “Yet somehow, within the disorder we’ve left behind, I’m charting a way through.”

Le Cerf’s compositions speak in the language of strata and shadows, vast stone forms and shifting impressions – “no direct sky, only its impression, mirrored in the stillness of a waterhole cradled by the curved palms of an encompassing rock vessel.”

The power of the artist’s paintings lies, in part, in her deep attention to materiality, allowing the work to hold, all at once, the vast sweep of the landscape and the granular, gritty detail of the earth’s surface – captured through layers of richly built encaustic.

A heroic achievement from one of today’s great visual lyricists of the Australian landscape, Wayfinding – A Painter’s Path is now available to preview by request. Please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au