The heroes of Ryan Presley’s latest paintings are often young Aboriginal women and men, casually dressed in trainers, tees and jeans. Off the canvas, they and their peers might be disproportionately policed, detained and vilified – but in Presley’s work they stand triumphant, heads wreathed in golden flames like avenging saints, standing tall over the instruments of state and colony.
In One Day This Will All Be Yours (2022), a young mother holding a baby points a stun gun at three white policemen, composed in a way that recalls the symmetry of Renaissance depictions of the Transfiguration of Jesus. In Crown Land (Till the Ends of the Earth) (2020) another woman channels Saint George and the Dragon as she sits astride a magnificent horse, wielding a machete against a chimera with the heads of a snake, paws of a lion, and a judge’s wig.
