Member of the Balgo Hills artistic community in the Kimberley (North West Australia), Helicopter Tjungurrayi is characterized by a very colorful way of painting in keeping with the tradition of this “school” between hills and desert. We find the Balgo painters' predilection for bright yellows, oranges and reds to evoke in the form of lines a set of sand dunes (or tali) located to the south of Balgo and where the painter was born and spent part of of his youth. At the heart of the Balgo Hills are three marshy places (or tjurrnu): Wangkartu, Ngakalpa and Karrulyar. Helicopter Tjungurrayi represents the Wangkartu site with dark circles in the middle of its canvases and structuring the space which becomes a sacred analogue of the territory evoked.
In accordance with desert tradition, these sites are presented as if they were seen from the sky: this way of painting is also referred to as "satellite vision" - itself borrowed from ritual paintings produced for millennia in using natural pigments and symbolically drawing the cartography of the region or sacred site celebrated.
Here, for conservation reasons, the natural pigments are replaced by acrylic colors but their palette remains consistent with tradition and replays the ocher hues dear to the heart of the Aboriginal aesthetic imagination.
The colored lines whose irregularity is reminiscent of waves or vibrations clearly suggest this life and the canvas itself seems to breathe and radiate not only in its own surface but also beyond as if it were only a part of a much larger whole – a macrocosm of light merging with the entire universe.
Collections: • Musée des Confluences, Lyon • Aboriginal Art Museum, Utrecht, Hollande • Musée du Quai Branly, Paris • National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne • Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney • Kluge Ruhe Collection, Etats-Unis • Artbank, Sydney • Edith cowan University, Western Australia • Laverty Collection, Australie • Gantner-Myer Collection, Australie • Harland Collection, Australie
