Review: Robert Boynes's Pacific Drift is solemnly majestic

While the public arts sector in Canberra largely hibernated under the weight of COVID over the past two years, the Belconnen Arts Centre, universally known as Belco Arts, doubled in size with new gallery spaces and glittering new facilities.

Its charismatic chief executive officer and artistic director, Monika McInerney, has launched this year's program with a series of exhibitions built around the theme of Aquifer - focusing on our diminishing water resources and climate change. At Belco Arts there are three exhibitions - Pacific Drift, Molecule and Flow - and there are further exhibitions related to Aquifer at the Canberra Glassworks, PhotoAccess, ANU School of Art and Design, Megalo, Drill Hall, Canberra Contemporary Arts Space and Tributary Projects (Gorman House).

Robert Boynes's Pacific Drift, the focus of this review, is a selection of the artist's oil paintings, on canvas and paper, that he executed between 1986 and 1990. It was at a time in his art when he was painting in oils, rather than his customary acrylics, and was enjoying the lush sensuousness of fields of paint with strong tactile surfaces. It has been several years since I have seen paintings from this period and the work has stood up quite well.

When they were first exhibited, the artist was living with his first wife, the late Mandy Martin, and the work of the two artists appeared stylistically too closely related. Now, some three decades later, it is possible to see the paintings as part of Boynes's own path of development and they have their own strength and integrity.

Despite his protestations, Boynes has always been an ethical artist who in his work adopts a strong political stance whether this be his early protests concerning US imperialism and Australia's involvement in the war in Vietnam, the looming global environmental catastrophe, or our existence in an increasingly police state with constant surveillance defining our existence.

The 13 paintings brought together in the Pacific Drift exhibition highlight a growing disaster that stemmed from a culmination of unbridled tourism and climate change.

Boynes writes about these paintings, "For me, the 'drift' started in the early 1980s when the Galapagos and Easter Island began to reveal the pressure of environmental concerns on their heritage due to tourism and rising sea levels. This series of works was motivated by the development of an international airstrip built down the centre of Easter Island in the eastern pacific.

"This dislocation to the local culture allowed me in my work, to imagine the carved stone monumental heads, which surround the island to be released and drift across the western pacific through other archipelagos gathering debris and huge floating islands of plastic. This flotilla eventually lands on the Australian shoreline. This interface between the ancient and recent western developments along these coastal areas has now become clear evidence of global warming and rising sea levels drifting towards us."

Although the paintings may be described as figurative, they are not literal or directly illustrative of a narrative like the one Boynes outlines in his catalogue essay. They are imbued with a sense of solemn majesty - the clash of realities - and the sense of foreboding concerning some unfolding disaster.

Back in the late 1980s, the threat from rising sea levels and climate change did not receive the universal acceptance that it does today.

Tragically, had these threats been heeded then, perhaps the world would not be so close to the brink of disaster as it is presently.

Boynes's dramatic and majestic paintings, including Pacific Drift, Floods/High-rise II and Mirage, have a prophetic quality.