Fernando do Campo
Self-Portrait with Companion contemplating the invasive trees in the garden, Meanjin/Brisbane, 2025
acrylic on canvas
122 x 153 cm
Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert is delighted to present Lilac Hour, a new body of work developed by do Campo specifically for MAF 2025. Working across his studios in Sydney and Brisbane, the paintings that form Lilac Hour will focus on the histories and presence of introduced flowering trees across temperate and subtropical Australia.
Statement from the artist:
“I’ve recently been working across two studios, one in Meanjin/Brisbane and the other in Gadigal/Sydney. There is a particular temporality between these two locations in the summer (the one-hour difference heightens my awareness of it). It’s about the fact that Jacarandas flower a week or two earlier up north, that evening skies are bluer down south, that the fruit bats return to the urban spaces earlier above the state-border. Because I was commuting every week over the summer, my body became acutely aware of shifts in flowering time, foliage colour, the rhythm of trees, daily companion species, and this in turn, made me aware of many other flowering trees and rhythmic cycles of the Australian seasons. Across a whole year of developing this work I learnt about Meanjin/Brisbane seasons, not through climate, but through the shifting palette of Latin American foliage that consumed the city each month. This body of work is about learning a new place through colour and looking slowly, it’s about sensing and documenting that slowly revealing temporality between the temperate and the subtropical fringe; my Lilac Hour.”
This series will be presented in the Gallery's booth, C4, for MAF 2025, Melbourne Convention Centre, Victoria.
