GUIDO MAESTRI

Guido Maestri’s last exhibition for Ames Yavuz, Planet Telex (2023), looked outward at a collapsing world refracted through the endless digital image stream. With Buoy, Maestri turns inward, charting a more intimate cartography. Where the earlier works sifted landscapes from online detritus, Buoy takes its bearings from the artist’s own literal and emotional tides, following a seismic shift in his living environment and personal life.

Earlier this year, Maestri moved to a boat-access-only house on Pittwater, Ku-ring-gai National Park. Every departure and return now demands a crossing. This small but significant voyage has transformed his sense of place, time and movement. It’s also fed into the work’s recurring motifs: reflections, waterways, dead trees rising from the shallows, and navigational buoys; those bright markers whose colour and shape signal safe passage or changed conditions.

Buoys carry a double meaning here: as maritime tools, they tether the floating to the fixed. They also speak to the artist’s own condition: adrift but held, suspended between states. Maestri’s weeks are now split between three distinct terrains: the new Pittwater home with his son, the Marrickville studio where he paints, and the bush-lined Yarra River in Melbourne with his partner. Each place imprints its distinct textures into paint, rearranged on the picture plane as Maestri’s new network of belonging.

–Daniel Mudie Cunningham