Paul Higgs’s paint constructions manifest such a magnificent array of ideas and visual impressions, through a material accretion so intense, there is no shred of our perceptual faculties that is left unstimulated. He leads us headlong into pandemonium, charting paths between ragged scraps of detritus, creating nodes of representation, then sending us back into the void. How do we begin to pin these works down? Perhaps they are landscapes. The ridgeline of the escarpment country he lives in, just south of Sydney, is surely there in the looming masses of his compositions; his twinkling fields of colour recall the forest canopy and the sea. But aren’t they abstract? Yes, that too. Is it his own graffiti that can be glimpsed through the layers of colour? Yes, he does write messages to himself and others on the work; there is also drawing there. Should his works be called drawings then, or paintings, or are they sculptures? He makes use of the techniques and visual conventions of many artforms, but Higgs’s recent coining of the descriptor ‘paint constructions’ has coincided with the intensification of the broad fields of painted colour in his work. The works in the current exhibition are, by turns, brooding, ravishing and spectacular, and the amplification of mood through colour is a factor in their emotive power. Joe Frost 2020