Artist Christopher Bassi Blends Eurocentric Oil Painting With a Reverence for Country
Eurocentric oil painting is brought beautifully into the present by this Brisbane/Meanjin-based artist’s exploration of the sacred.
As a Meriam and Yupungathi man who engages in the traditions of European oil painting, Christopher Bassi says he’s “very aware” that, historically, the medium “has fallen short in telling the stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples”.
In Australia, early paintings rarely depicted the continent’s tropical north, preferring the pastoral landscapes in the south, says Bassi, who works from Brisbane/Meanjin. “It was a tool for colonial visions of Australia. Then Albert Namatjira used watercolour and started painting his Country. I’m also painting my Country; my works are inextricably tied to my family and our story as Torres Strait Islander people.”
His practice is anchored, too, in a transcendent love for painting itself. “Standing in front of Rubens’ Adoration of the Magi at the Prado was almost a spiritual experience. My sensibility is drawn to painting; it’s slow, meditative and manual. The actual making is just a brush and paint. Conceptually, I love thinking about what Baroque painters like [Diego] Velázquez were trying to do with the medium and what I can learn from that.”
Bassi’s shell paintings are first made as small sculptures. He photographs them, enlarges the prints to human-like proportions and paints them. “From a European perspective, shells carry ideas of the exotic,” he says of the series entitled New Monument. “But from my perspective they represent home and family. We’re in a moment, globally, of contesting what we monumentalise. As somebody from Saltwater Country with ancestral connection to the sea, I see them as monuments to the ocean.”
The artist’s first institutional solo show, Notes for a Palm Sermon, at Cairns Art Gallery earlier this year featured 14 landscapes, inspired by time he spent on Thursday Island. The palms, mangoes, frangipani and hibiscus swelter in an orange light, inspired by a Baroque palette, which voids their easy-breezy island air for a gravitas the viewer can’t entirely glean. Bassi returned to the Torres Strait Islands again recently – “my new works will be direct paintings from the mangrove forests” – while his large-scale self-portrait, Meeting The Mangrove (2024), commissioned for the 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, references The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. “I was recreating a biblical understanding of sacredness from my perspective as a Komet man, one of the eight tribes of Mer Island,” says Bassi. “One of our totems is the mangrove seed pod. That’s a First Nations worldview; we’re not above the landscape, we’re part of it.”
Exhibited at: Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Ames Yavuz Gallery, Sydney; Cairns Art Gallery
Achievements: Kevin Taylor Legacy residency with TCL Landscape Architects (2025); QAGOMA Vida Lahey Memorial Travelling Scholarship (2025)
What the critics say: “In painting, Bassi gives architecture to that sacredness and mines an expansive cultural reservoir – from philosophy to art theory to literature to religion – with self-reflexive insight.” Adam Ford, Artist Profile
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SEE ALSO: First Nations Artist Naomi Hobson’s Works Are a Reclamation of Country and Community
Image credits: The artist Christopher Bassi in his studio, photographed by Joe Rucki; His self-portrait "Meeting The Mangrove" (2024); "New Monument" exhibition at Ames Yavuz Gallery, Sydney
