My work is grounded in a question central to art and image culture today: what is real, and what is performed? That question cuts across painting, digital media, and identity politics. By exploring how meaning is shaped – or distorted – by repetition, expectation, and curated experience, my paintings fit in a broader cultural conversation about authenticity, affect, and identity. They also reflect something broader about the culture they come from. They point to a world shaped by aspirational repetition – where we chase the same destinations, the same images, the same emotional highs, believing that transformation can be purchased, staged, or curated. There’s an exhaustion in that cycle, and a real vulnerability too. My work holds space for both: the craving and the doubt, the beauty and the unease. It asks whether something real can still break through all that surface, and what it means to us when it does.
In my figurative works, I try to capture the vulnerability that arises when we face this uncertainty. The gloss of perfection is seductive but using it without falling for it is a fine edge. My abstract works push this further, playing with the illusion of resolution or order while allowing something else to emerge – an underlying disruption, a challenge to surface-level certainty. That emotional charge – the unease, the vulnerability, the reach for clarity – persists across both.
My paintings expose this contradiction: I’m drawn to critique the gloss, but am also complicit in creating it – intending that my works both explore and embody that seduction.
And they are not just about what is pictured, but how uncertainty, doubt, and contradiction are held within the process itself. My work aligns with a shift in contemporary painting away from fixed resolutions and toward ambiguity, complexity, and instability. I’m drawn to that moment when less-considered marks shift from chaos to some resolution – when surrendering to uncertainty creates unexpected structure. Works like Wick and Figure sit here: quiet, yet unrestrained, but with tension.
I’ve always been drawn to the balance between structure and mess – both in painting and in life, and I’m interested in how meaning might emerge through the process of questioning perception and experience.
I want my work to also resonate with a broader emotional and cultural restlessness. The repetition, the abstraction of feeling, the intensity of colour – it reflects something many now live with, especially in a post-pandemic, hyper-digital, accelerated world. There’s an ongoing disorientation in how we connect and respond, and I want that to be present in the push-pull of my paintings.
In Slide, an abandoned and unused waterpark – made for joy, now quiet and sun-bleached – its surface still holds a memory of perfection. The painting is about that feeling: it’s shiny and inviting, but something’s slipping. The seduction is still there, but so is the rust. It’s about the tension when beauty is holding on as it begins to break.
Like many Australians on today’s Grand Tour – LA, Palm Springs, the Amalfi Coast, Bali, Rishikesh, we expect beauty, escape, transformation. We travel to the same backdrops, chasing experiences already packaged and sold to us. The promise is that something will shift – that by going, we’ll come back changed. But can a curated experience deliver something real? Or are we just rehearsing a fantasy that was never ours to begin with? The desire is genuine, but the scripts are worn. I move through these places visually and emotionally, pulled in by the surface, but conscious of the gap between what’s promised and what’s felt. The paintings in this exhibition sit in that space – between longing and disillusion, saturation and collapse.
Guru is based on the view from the verandah pavilion of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s private, luxurious residence within his abandoned ashram in Rishikesh, India – famously where the Beatles stayed in 1968. The structure overlooks the Ganges River and the town below. He offered a path to enlightenment, and people came from all over the world, drawn in by his promises, mantras, and the allure of spiritual clarity. The site is now crumbling and overgrown, but the pull of belief still hangs in the air. The lurid, oversaturated palette reflects that atmosphere – where more is more, and restraint is irrelevant. This work ties into the restlessness that drives much of my painting: the compulsion to seek significance, even when it might not be there.
Overlay is based on a favourite subject of mine, a mid-century house in Palm Springs with a pool and diving board in centre, front view. Its perfection is discomforting, as if something is about to collapse. The surface of the water reflects everything, but offers nothing beneath. The red palette is both warm and warning. It’s about what we’re drawn to, and whether the desire, escape, and performance we project onto it is sustainable.
Golden uses seduction and polish intentionally – not just as stylistic choices, but as conceptual tools. The gloss becomes both a lure and a mirror, placing the work in dialogue with broader critiques of marketable aesthetics. Beauty, branding, and desire are entangled with deeper questions of value and belief, and I want the work to sit right in that tangle.
In this new exhibition, I’m continuing to paint that tension – between the idealised and the real, between surface and something harder to hold. These works sit inside the noise of image culture, but also reach for what might live beneath it. They’re about seduction, performance, repetition – but also about doubt, dissonance, and what’s left when the gloss fades – because that’s where the questions start to become real.
Have we learned to want what we’re told to want?
Do we trust our responses, or are they just echoes of something sold to us?
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Waldemar Kolbusz, Perth June 2025
This text was developed in collaboration with ChatGPT, as part of a reflective writing process: the ideas, language, and direction remain my own but pretending otherwise would be part of the illusion I’m painting over.