Karl Maughan: Southland (2024)

As winter passes and spring beckons, brightly-coloured rhododendrons and softer toned azaleas begin to bud and open. Emerging from buds and walls of verdant green, as if dipped in paint itself, gardenscapes appear with structure and form developing where there had seemed to be almost none before.

In Southland Karl Maughan takes us on a journey into locations and specific environments which at first seem idyllic. But as they morph and change they become narratives of an implied journey and an altering site-specific experience – part-unsettling, part-suggestive – of beckoning enclosed spaces, as much about what is not seen as what is depicted.

Depending on viewing distance, all of Maughan’s paintings transform back and forth from being utterly realistic to being abstracted marks and slashes of side-by-side colour. Musical in nature, Maughan’s works distil colour essences into different states of being.

Eskdale River Farm is outstanding and monumental. Immediately the viewer has a profound sensation of being in the middle of something much larger, of therefore being surrounded and bathed in colour, darkness and light.

Maughan uses the architecture of place, descending and ascending scale, the almost ghostly presence of a distant landscape, and pools of light and dark to build atmospheres, and he places us right inside these. Winton, Millers Flat, Wairuna, Mataura, Gore and Grove Bush are as much painterly acts of respect as they are treatises of reverential beauty and joy. Lawrence and Waipahi, Woodlands and Mandeville place a path at the viewer’s feet and an immersive journey commences.