Christopher Bassi
Christopher Bassi’s practice links an intricate web of ideas, beliefs and concepts with his Torres Strait Islander heritage, making for a richly evocative heartland that combines his love of painting with deeply-felt personal vulnerabilities.
Image credit: Christopher Bassi, Shade from the Sun, 2021, oil on canvas, 250 x 200 cm. Courtesy the artist and Ames Yavuz
When I visit Christopher Bassi’s studio one morning at the end of the hot Brisbane summer, he’s not there. It is early in the opening week of the Adelaide Biennial; he is in demand. However, by the time I descend the stairs from the upstairs level – where his studio is flanked by those of a few Brisbane architects and design professionals – he calls me, apologetic. I emerge into intense sunlight, its resonance similar to the glowing yellow background of the wall-size painting Bassi created for the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. I saw Meeting the Mangrove in progress during a previous visit to his studio; by now it has departed for its debut in the exhibition Inner Sanctum, promising a different style of engagement. Curator José Da Silva poses this year’s Biennial as an encounter with the most private of worlds, that inhabited by artists, poets and musicians.
Meeting the Mangrove is Bassi’s largest painting to date. It is an intricate web of ideas, beliefs and concepts exploring his personal connections to mangroves, painting and an imaginative interior landscape. In his painting process, he finds “a space for anything to happen. It draws on those moments we already have in our visual language and memory, and applies them to something that felt like it was about my family.”
Bassi’s heritage includes Torres Strait Islander (Meriam, Yupungathi), and these roots are woven into the spiritual and emotional connections in his work. Embracing social justice for all First Nations peoples, he creates a richly evocative ... Subscribe to read this article in full
