Candi Dentice creates visually engaging paintings with powerful environmental messages. Her latest exhibition combines symbols and objects in unconventional ways within refined, highly detailed New Zealand landscapes.Her compositions are playful and whimsical narratives filled with references to contemporary society.
Using a rich visual language with a fine and subtle technique perfected over a lifetime of painting, Dentice brings the unique and primeval qualities of the New Zealand landscape to our attention. Incorporating minute detail sourced through her continual and keen observation of the landscape, Dentice's exquisite renderings remind us of the fragile nature of the environment. That the politics of the works are embedded in these scenes serves to heighten the importance of the message, showing precisely what we stand to lose should we ignore the warnings.
Works such as Roundabout and Meltdown directly confront the commoditisation of our society and the impact that this issue has on the environment. The frivolous carousel and the dripping ice-cream cone evoke the pointless and excessive nature of unthinking consumerism. Dentice deepens the metaphor by including ethereal impressions of landscapes, frieze-like, around the top of the carousal and on the ice-cream cone. The small scale of these vistas, and the lightness of touch, gives a sense that these are fleeting impressions under threat by the devastating impact on the earth's atmosphere from vehicle discharge.
Western countries are under constant pressure to open up more and more land to housing. Dentice succinctly captures this pressure in Tide which depicts the New Zealand landscape under threat by the spread of urbanisation. The damaging effect of de-forestation is also implicit in the work as more and more hardwood forests are bulldozed to provide wood to feed growth around the world. Land and water shortages are also evoked in the spare composition of Trade Me, perhaps the most strikingly political work of the exhibition. A pine seedling breaks through the parched landscape, the detritus of needles and the uniformity of the scene speaking of the devastation left behind after commercial pine forestry and the replacement of verdant native forests for the silence of tracts of Radiata pines.
Of comparable importance to the subject matter and the environmental messages conveyed by the artist is the beauty of her technique. Dentice’s works have a strong basis in drawing, which results in very fine, intricate images, with a strong emphasis on line. There is a soft haze-like quality overall which enhances the surreal untouched beauty of the landscape and consequently the fragile nature of it in the modern world.
With a huge amount of time invested in the making of every painting, Dentice approaches her work with significant consideration and thought. She creates a large part of the allegory in her pieces through her carefully considered stylistic and compositional choices, deliberation that is extended even to the titles of the work, all of which have relevance to the main message in the piece.
Dentice selects symbols for their anachronistic qualities and then juxtaposes them with contemporary objects to create a whimsical and playful dialogue relating to social change. Roundabout sees an antique carousel filled with contemporary Japanese cars (including a pointedly selected 'smart' car); hard-edged paper swans float across a lake bounded by imported European trees in the sepia-toned idyll Radiance; Victorian wallpaper provides the backdrop for a collection of native flora in Still Life. The scenes are remembrances, at once humorous and poignant, that create nostalgia for times when words such as global warming, fossil fuel emissions and ozone layer were not part of our vocabulary.