Christopher Bassi

Meriam and Yupungathi artist, Christopher Bassi, coalesces an impressive reservoir of cultural references and knowledge to paint his place in this world. Here, Adam Ford explores the archipelagic thinking behind Bassi's practice and uncovers a painterly world of oily and watery multiplicities.

I meet with Christopher Bassi in his studio on infamous Boundary Street (the former margin of Magandjin / Brisbane’s once segregated city limits). It is well-lit and crisp white—flanked by large canvases in gradating stages of completion and a desk with the usual office tackle. Books naturally pile around, and chronicle painters of influence including Velázquez, Goya, Delacroix, Rembrandt, and William Blake. Beginning with classes in oil as a child and moving to textile design in his adolescence, Bassi undertook formal training at Queensland College of Art in 2017 where he completed a Bachelor of Fine Art majoring in painting and art theory. Painting—the very impost of painters—is an indissoluble premise of his practice.

Bassi is first and foremost a painter in the service of painting. In oil, he maintains the art historic legibility of the medium by taking a learned interest in the canon of European representational painting and the attendance of its literary corollaries. He cites Dante’s Divine Comedy, c.1321, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, 1667, as influences; but also, Caribbean poets and writers such as Derek Walcott, Aimé Césaire, and Jean Rhys. As a Meriam and Yupangathi man whose matrilineal descent connects him to the Torres Strait Islands, Bassi’s global interests and other cultural attendances place his work in generative tension. He shows me a hand-drawn family tree that charts British, Indo-Muslim, and Malay ancestry to underline this point—and in doing so, operationalises the “archipelagic thinking” of Caribbean poet-philosopher Édouard Glissant. Posited as a relational means of watery difference (kinship) between island societies, archipelagic thinking is Bassi’s means of placing himself at the juncture of his manifold cross-cultural contacts and influences, from where broader and more localised “Islander” themes and motifs appear and are negotiated.

This, then, reveals much about Bassi’s palette, which swelters with the familiarity of a Queensland sun and coruscates with the comforting sting of its light. Take, for example, the way buttery yellows blister into sunburnt oranges, or how greens slowly sour into mucky tussocks of khaki. His paintings literally sweat under this heat. He points to a still-life—a giant clam—where feint basal pigment trickles down the canvas. This mark-making is intentional. After ridding his canvases of their white with a yellow ochre underwash, Bassi begins sketching out a drawing, built up over progressive layers. In doing so he proffers a “palimpsest,” a painterly manuscript, which bears his first marks and all after, and so says something not only of painting’s historical legibility, but the archipelagic sensibilities of its application in view of his island home.

“If I think about my progress as a painter,” Bassi reflects, “it starts with pearl shells . . . At home we had a piano . . . [which functioned] like an altar. There’d be pearl shells, photographs, and other Islander memorabilia [covering the lid]. My aunties would play island music.” Bassi keenly considers how space might enact a set of cultural relations that draw upon identity, family, and memory, to reperform home. “These spaces are really important in [our] households, particularly living so far away and being disconnected from Country.” Born and raised in Magandjin, Bassi’s connection to his ancestral home is enacted through visitation and recollective encounters given to him through family histories and stories. And so, when he paints pearl shell, he isn’t just painting a shell but a self-portrait, a photo album, a family tree, sheet music, home.

When I look around his studio, I notice numerous shells painted in still life, which include some that were exhibited in Primavera, 2023, at the Museum of Contemporary Art. In many ways shells are archetypal archipelagic symbols, owing not only to their island environs but their liminality and transitionality: between sea and shore; utility and detritus; back and forth; endless visitation and departure. What I find most captivating about these paintings are the chimeric incongruities they shoulder, appearing to possess limbs or appendages. Arms or legs are suggested but aren’t readily discernible. “I give a cone shell a body and then start gluing other shells together,” explains Bassi. “Suddenly, they become figures or chalices, vessels . . . cups even.” This resolves how a spider shell unexplainably teeters atop a trochus or how cockle shells enclose to form a calcite aureole. There’s something transcendental about this painterly affair. I ask about the appendages and Bassi shows me an Infant Jesus of Prague statue that his mother is never without. Suddenly, these littoral effigies become angels fanning their wings. I can hear the fanfare of trumpet shells announcing their procession as the water in their cup runneth over.

In purview of a Torres Strait irrevocably touched by Christianity, Bassi’s practice naturally picks up creational themes accordant with the faith (though he is not himself religious). I consider, then, his largest work to date, the self-portrait Meeting a Mangrove, 2024, currently exhibiting in the 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Inner Sanctum curated by José Da Silva. Bassi paints a red mangrove branch extending itself toward his outstretched finger; and just as God’s touch gave life to Adam, so his estuarine totem gives him. In his reperforming of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco The Creation of Adam, c.1508–12, Bassi dissolves the border between mangrove and studio as a canvas backdrop rolls into the water from which the former grows. He thus dissolves the border between this place and there; himself and Other; so that the exchange of two bears not a “pure” one—not from two things hybridised or from a third synthesised—but a self in endless negotiation. Glissant’s unpredictable “meeting and interference” informed by Deleuzian “becoming.” This is the logic of creolisation, which is central to archipelagic thought, and visits upon Bassi an “Islander-ness” in perpetual negotiation; an “Islander-ness,” though concretely known, is never purely resolved—nor is it ever dispersed. In perpetuity lies multiplicity. In one Bassi are all Bassis; in one archipelago, all archipelagos; in one painting, all paintings.

“I’m conscious of keeping my practice about being in a painter’s studio,” Bassi concludes. “This space is important.” It’s not difficult to see why. The studio is the warehouse of creation. It is the theatre of negotiation—the endless becoming of identity, connection, family, and memory. Like that prototypical piano altar, the studio harmonises something sacred. In painting, Bassi gives architecture to that sacredness and mines an expansive cultural reservoir—from philosophy to art theory to literature to religion—with self-reflexive insight. Referents, ideas, reperformances, imaginaries—everything is bought into endless eidetic alignment and tension. Though I did start from the privileged position of having known and worked with Bassi previously, I end, having fared the archipelagic seas of his thought, with the realisation that there’s really no end at all. I’ve only just wet my feet.

This article was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 67

EXHIBITION
New Monument
25 May – 29 June 2024 
Ames Yavuz, Sydney