Susie Dureau’s exhibition Rhythmia at Curatorial+Co invites the viewer to tap out of the everyday and into the sublime – or rather, to tap into the everyday, where the sublime has always been waiting. The paintings, depicting the sounds of animals in abstracted form, reflect the artist’s growing awareness of the pulse of life.
Working from her residency in Eramboo next to the Ku-ring-gai National Park in Sydney’s north, Dureau allows her audience, even just for a moment, a chance to disconnect. To be surrounded and immersed in the energy of nature. Through a long study of the origins of Western landscape painting tradition, the artist has come to understand that everything has frequencies; everything is connected. Dureau invites a curiosity as she deliberates on her encounters with her environment and escaping the grind. The sounds, the feeling of wind on your skin, the sand between your toes.
Susie Dureau, Rhythmia, 2025, oil on linen, 162 × 132cm. Courtesy the artist
In a deepening of her practice, this series follows on from her previous atmospheric landscape paintings. They are a progression deeper into the heart of the natural world. She turns to the sounds around, and thanks to the data and graphs of spectrograms, they become visual representations. Dureau layers these images, so much so the final image becomes blurred as a digital artwork, before being captured in paint on canvas. The clicks, squeals, and whistles of a dolphin become mark-making and washes of colour across the canvas. Or the translation of the migratory crossing of the ‘arctic tern’ bird into shifting tones and forms. The artworks are all filled with stories.
Susie Dureau, Spotted Dove, 2025, oil on linen, 36 × 46cm. Courtesy the artist
But, alongside this, the paintings are also self-portraits as Dureau maps the interplay between her rhythms and the larger ones at play beyond. As an artist does, to think, consider, and delve into the role of one person in the scheme of it all. Engaging the hand of the artist, the gestural brushstrokes add to the pulse. The canvases are heavily primed, with layers and layers of paint for a visual complexity of light and pigmentation. In varying shades of blues, greys, pinks and washes of ivory and cream, the application sees the paint blur and merge. The sounds of the landscape are turned into something physical: a painting on canvas, rich with oil paint and heavy with the artist’s gesture.
“The act of painting is an act of attunement, a way of making contact with these rhythms. Stretching linen, brushing, scraping, and layering pigment suggests the erosive and generative forces of nature itself. As paint settles into the weave of linen,” says Dureau.
Rhythmia offers a closeness to nature and cultivates curiosity. An antidote to modern life and what’s beyond the surface, an invitation to feel the pulse.
Emma-Kate Wilson is an art and design writer and editor based on Gumbaynggirr Country (Bellingen, New South Wales).
Curatorial+Co.
9 to 26 April 2025
Sydney
