Marcus ‘Double O’ Camphoo Kemarre & Clifford Thompson Japaljarri: Plus / Minus

At first glance, the paintings of Marcus ‘Double O’ Camphoo Kemarre and Clifford Thompson Japaljarri can appear remarkably close. Lines repeat across surfaces, squares sit inside squares, bands of colour divide and contain space. Both artists return insistently to repetition, geometry and rhythm. Yet the apparent formal relationship between their work quickly gives way to something far more complex.

Both artists are connected to Alekarenge (Ali Curung), a small community approximately 350 kilometres north-east of Mparntwe and 150 kilometres south of Tennant Creek. Double O lives and paints there today, Clifford was raised there before moving to Tennant Creek. Their histories intersect across the Barkly, a region shaped by extraordinarily strong and continuing cultural life, but also by the ongoing effects of colonisation, pastoralism, mining and resource extraction.

Both their practices developed in Tennant Creek through what would become the Tennant Creek Brio. The collective emerged in 2016 from an outreach art-therapy program and men’s group, where a group of Warumungu, Warlpiri, Kaytetye and Alyawarr men came together to paint. What began in this social and therapeutic context developed into a radical and highly distinctive collective practice, with the Brio becoming known for work that collapses distinctions between painting, assemblage, found material, cultural memory and the detritus of contemporary life.

Their shared connection to Ali Curung and Tennant Creek therefore matters not because it produces a shared aesthetic, but because it locates these apparently abstract paintings within a real and contemporary place. The similarities between their works draw us in, their differences tell us far more. Together, they offer two distinct ways of making from the Barkly now, two practices formed within overlapping geographies and histories, but refusing any expectation that they should speak with the same voice.