Graduating with a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from the National Art School in Sydney in 2017, Maurangi C Carrol’s practice is the result of investigations into the virtual space and its cultural and historical influence on the language of pictorial phenomena. The abstract and figure-filled paintings explore the negotiations left by post-internet art; depicted in primary colours and rich with texture.
In his practice, Carrol experiments with chance-based methodologies and cultural memory/ experience through traditional methods of pāreu and tivaevae — dying and staining learnt through his experiences travelling to his mother's country of birth in the Cook Islands (Rarotonga).
Carrol paints layers onto the reverse of his linen canvases. He describes the artworks as geological — an expression of tectonic plates, intersecting and competing for the right of surface privilege like forest trees competing for the sunlight awaiting them above.
The palette employed within Carrol’s works are heavily influenced by his time spent in Polynesia — bright reds, oranges, greens, blues, pinks. The paintings are an attempt to reprocess the digital source material back into an analogue process of painting. The appearance of pixelation within the surface is a gesture towards that end.
When this effect has been achieved, the appearance of travelling pixels of solid colour and solitary specks drift into larger voids of Rorschach forms. Bodily contours at play between foreground/ background blocks of colour are to a reduced unity of the pictorial plane.
The virtual exploration of topographical maps and human simulation software are important resources for Carrol’s practice, with the paintings employing the forms and shapes found.
Here, Carrol finds and utilises virtual software technology that depicts simulations of the human form. Taking apart these collected images, he splices elements and forms from multiple source images to create compositions that evoke the uncanniness of distorted and enlarged/ elongated human forms. Carrol depicts these figures void of facial uniqueness to express their status as pure simulacrum. These figures become universal portraits.