

Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, catalogue number WT0704010
The Luczo Family Collection, USA
New York Times critic Roberta Smith regarded Warlimpirrnga’s canvases as the best Desert art she has encountered, noting that ‘Mr. Tjapaltjarri’s lines accumulate into continuous surfaces that, however simply made, are never still or flat. They are intensely optical, but not Op: their handmade vitality avoids that style’s soulless surfaces and designs.’2
Luke Scholes, who has worked closely with Warlimpirrnga, takes us deeper into the phenomenological source of his disciplined practice. Scholes deduces that the artist’s ‘renderings that shimmer and gleam with the potency of objects from which they are drawn: pearl shells and kurditiji (shields), the former known to be the prized possessions of traditional healers, of which Warlimpirrnga is one.’3 Indeed, the closely aligned strata of Warlimpirrnga’s surfaces shift ceaselessly, just as light diffuses from the nacre of pearl.
Paradoxically, the dynamic effect shrouds the artist’s inner stillness, whose attention, when painting, is fixed on the next dot. Falcon-like, Warlimpirrnga’s gaze is unswerving despite the refractive kinesis of the vast dizzying field that envelops his peripheral vision.
JK
1 Fred R. Myers and Luke Scholes, 'Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri: Powerful presence in person and in paint', in No boundaries: Aboriginal Australian contemporary abstract painting from the Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection, Munich, DelMonico Books, Prestel, 2014, p 132-35.
2 Roberta Smith, ‘Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri’s Aboriginal Dreamtime Paintings’, The New York Times, 15, 10, 2015.
3 Fred R. Myers and Luke Scholes, 'Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri: Powerful presence in person and in paint', in No boundaries: Aboriginal Australian contemporary abstract painting from the Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection, Munich, DelMonico Books, Prestel, 2014, p 136.