Hypersonic Realism: The Landscapes of Reg Mombassa

I first met Reg Mombassa when he was Chris O’Doherty at art school in the 1970s. In those days students in the painting studios were each allocated a six-foot square, marked out on the floor in masking tape. One evening Chris constructed his space as a six-foot-square paper-walled gallery to exhibit a series of his tiny paintings and writing. I seem to recall he’d invited sixty people to the opening. It was a very memorable and Mombassian event.

Introducing this revised 2024 edition of The Landscapes of Reg Mombassa, Reg explains with a characteristically wry twist, that Hypersonic Realism is a new art movement relating to “the extremely high-speed landscape drawings that I create in moving cars. Hypersonic missiles travel faster than the speed of sound and this explains why, when I am drawing at a hypersonic rate, the scratching of the charcoal on paper is only heard once the drawing is completed.”

What follows is a very handsome and comprehensive album covering the whole gamut of his drawings, prints, and paintings made in response to the landscapes of Australia and New Zealand, ranging from very early work (of 1968), through to the present. Works are grouped and intersected with passages of his own commentary, reflections, and reminiscences under headings of such Mombassian themes as Houses, Miniatures, Telegraph Poles, Trees, and Robots.

As a celebrated songwriter it is natural that Reg is also a gifted poet, and three are included in this book. Sheepwalking is a particularly fine piece depicting “an ovine shrine in a land undulated by ungulates.” In the accompanying colour pencil work, Commemorative tumulus (Sheep engraved step pyramid), 2004, the uppermost sheep is illuminated by a shaft of heavenly light, almost as if Jan Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, c. 1420s–1432, had been transplanted to New Zealand.

Mombassa’s “hypersonic” working process has developed from his many years on the road as a touring musician, originally with Mental As Anything and these days, still going strong with Dog Trumpet, capturing passing landscapes from the windscreens of moving vehicles or seen through motel windows. (He theorises that the passage of light is slowed by passing through glass and this gives his work its contemplative quality.) Having captured, by drawing or snapshot, a passing scene—houses by the roadside or vehicles en route—he has subsequently developed these into highly refined and beautifully atmospheric miniature oil paintings or small pencil studies. As he says, these landscapes come to take on a quality which is “both ordinary and also somewhat mysterious and other worldly.”

Reg especially celebrates modest postwar fibro or weatherboard cottages—the kind of house his carpenter father built around Auckland as he was growing up. This kind of house, so particular to Australia and New Zealand, would seem today to be an increasingly endangered species, falling victim to the aspirational housing market. There is something poignant about Mombassa’s meticulous rendering of them—with their starkly sunlit facades and the drama of the deep blue and dark green shadows they cast upon their surrounds.

It would seem Reg works pretty incessantly. He has always drawn compulsively, and he gives a lovely account of time spent at Frank Watters’ property at Cassilis, NSW, where he saw the local trees as “friends” having so often drawn their “scars, striations, cankers, loppings, seeping wounds, termite trails, and peeling bark.” And he sings praises of that “most ancient art material” charcoal, as offering a range of qualities “from the rich, fat, and utterly black” to the “thin, stuttered, and scratchily minimal.”

Mombassa’s talents are many and various. As a counterpoint to his small finely rendered oil paintings and plein air bush studies, there are his funky and feral pastiches of mutant Australiana, the bizarre persona of the Australian Jesus, alien invaders, and his disturbingly raw apocalyptic visions of environmental disaster, and clunky robot infested nightmares. They are all here. There is the Miscegenetic cross-pollination (Australasia), 2006, of species; The Intoxicated vomiting robot II, 2019; and A maggot-infested business horse studies his plans for a new smelter (Upper Hunter), 2012. His is a Boschian vision of late capitalism collapsing under the weight of its own excesses.

Hypersonic Realism, which brings together a mighty 296 works, fittingly showcases Chris O’Doherty’s extraordinary range as a highly inventive artist, musician and songwriter, poet, and social commentator. Just as his artwork ranges from subtle and tender renderings of landscapes through which he has travelled, to unsettling visions of raw and wild grotesquery, the passages of text he has threaded throughout this book are characteristically frank and thoughtful, intermingling deeply serious and heartfelt concerns with expressions of a unique dark and sardonic wit.

In conclusion, I particularly enjoyed Reg’s reflections on that former icon of the suburban backyard, the Hills Hoist which, he explains, after millions of years of random mutations, emerged fully evolved in South Australia in the 1940s, as “a distant cousin of the gum tree.”

“I fondly recall buying a packet of Hills Hoist seeds and scattering them in the freshly laid concrete of the backyard of our new house . . . and within a few months a fully mature Hills Hoist was the dominant feature of our garden.”

This article was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 69