Canberra artist Dionisia (Dioni) Salas, presently based in Braidwood, is in the spotlight at a major exhibition at the Goulburn Regional Art Gallery.

With the enthusiastic support of Yvette Dal Pozzo, the Goulburn gallery director, and with a professional catalogue with texts by Shaune Lakin and Elspeth Pitt, curators at the National Gallery of Australia, the argument seems to be that if Salas is not the next big thing in Australian art, then at least she is a significant emerging artist.

A graduate from the School of Art in Canberra, Salas was mentored by Vivienne Binns, the pioneering feminist artist.

Aged in her early 40s, Salas, like many artists of her generation, dislikes being pigeonholed within a particular orientation in art. Her art could be described as visceral, instinctive and involving a process where the artist surrenders to the flow of the work rather than following a carefully premeditated plan.

Dionisia Salas, To fall in spring, 2022, oil on canvas, 95 x 95 cm. Photo: Goulburn Regional Gallery.

The term ‘automatic drawing’ is occasionally applied to the sort of work she engages with where the artist starts a painting or a drawing with no conscious plan in mind. A shape appears that may morph into something else or encounter some incident in the arena of the canvas or sheet of paper – and so the painting grows.

Artists within this process of work occasionally feel they lose control of the work, or rather, the work gains a life of its own that exists somehow outside their conscious control. Traditionally, it was a favourite strategy of artists linked with the surrealists including Joan Miró, André Masson and Max Ernst.

Dionisia Salas, No tongue bitter she, 2023, oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm, photograph by Steven Best. Photo: Goulburn Regional Gallery.

Salas appears to work within a broad feminist orientation and employs organic forms that in appearance may resemble bodily parts. Her work cannot be described as abstract, nor is it figurative in any literal sense.

Her forms are slippery, ambiguous and have no prescribed interpretation and I suspect will be understood differently by different viewers. Some of the bigger paintings, including No tongue bitter she, 2023, To fall in spring, 2022, With spent mouths, 2023, Of mouth and mind, 2024, and Night Jar, 2024, are attractive, intricate and seductive, rather than sensuous.

Dionisia Salas, Of mouth and mind, 2024, oil on canvas, 102 x 107 cm. Photo: Goulburn Regional Gallery.

She generally works in oils on easel size, usually square canvases roughly a metre square. The paint is quite thin and runny, but in works including With spent mouths, No tongue bitter she and Night Jar, the artist is happy for us to see her brushstrokes and follow her battle with the painting. The titles are evocative, but not helpful – at least to me.

The process of painting appears to involve initially establishing a ground, something resembling a urine yellow or a light menstrual red, on which the forms of the painting are allowed to organically grow and develop. There seems to be a sizeable bucket of narratives dumped on each of the canvases where they are allowed to find some sort of resolution or build up dialogues and establish confrontations or resolve tensions.

Dionisia Salas, With spent mouths, 2023, oil on canvas, 97 x 97 cm. Photo: Goulburn Regional Gallery.

Salas creates engaging work that probably carries personal meanings for the artist. But viewers run the risk of over interpretation. What may appear as mouths, foetal forms and intestines to one viewer could be interpreted as some sort of fantastic still life that would find a home in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.

Salas’s work has an integrity and is a slow burner. It is an uneven show, where successful works outnumber those yet to be fully resolved.

The exhibition justifies a stop in Goulburn and a visit to the regional gallery where there is also a superb exhibition of another Canberra artist, photographer Sammy Hawker. Her obsession with bees creates images that are beautiful and deeply moving.

Dionisia Salas, Night Jar, 2024, oil on canvas, 122 x 122 cm. Photo: Goulburn Regional Gallery.

Dionisia Salas, Of mouth and mind and Sammy Hawker, Conversations with bees, are open at the Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, 184 Bourke Street, Goulburn, until 1 February, 2025, Monday to Friday, 9 am to 5 pm, Saturday 12 pm to 4 pm.