Herald St

In one painting, a desert-like yellow meets a lozenge of maroon, the canvas bisected by a horizon-like smear of candy pink. It’s an augury of serene weather to come (‘red sky at night, shepherd’s delight’). This palette – startling, playful – recurs throughout the series, from the washes of dazzling fuchsia to the shades of magenta dissolving into purple, mimicking the spread of ink through water.

There are darker, melancholic moments, too. Cloudy indigoes and bruise-like mauves hover between autumnal introspection and some warmer zone of feeling. Cerulean breaks through grey like rain clouds clearing after a storm.

Elsewhere, a euphoric note is struck by strobes of amber, red and green: a disco-light aura. In another canvas, the ethereal, gauzy quality of the aurora borealis is conjured as if from frozen Scandinavian skies. Shades of glacial green ribbon into scorching scarlet, before steeply falling away into navy bordering on black. Such combinations of colour riff on nature’s very own artifice, and the ways in which such phenomena both inspire and contain the blueprint of human creativity.

This making of patterns – the traces we inherit and leave everywhere around us – is made overt in two of the works: companion pieces in which abstraction finds more definite shape. In one, Amm uses his fingers to streak multi-coloured paint across a milky white background, evoking the tails of small asteroids. In another, the paint is triangulated into bright ribbons – yellow, red, blue – suggesting an attempt at resolution that is also an undoing: the kind of neat coherence that forever eludes us.

Text by Daniel Culpan