These enigmatic depictions of city-centre vistas seem vaguely familiar, yet they exude an air of ethereal unreality, their desertion and stripped-down appearance lends them a post-Apocalyptic
Nina Murdoch's oil paintings seem to re-configure and somehow reinvent the cityscapes that they represent. They have an air of menace and of the sublime, in equal measure. These enigmatic depictions of city-centre vistas seem vaguely familiar, yet they exude an air of ethereal unreality, their desertion and stripped-down appearance lends them a post-Apocalyptic, somewhat traumatized demeanour. These art scenarios whose uncanny edge we could only have experienced in our dreams. Nowhere is there a sign of human presence. The oblique and often low-angled illumination of these buildings seems to emphasise their star rectilinear silhouettes. Light and shadow are not just complementary here, but vie for precedence, the sublime light elevating the mood, while the stygian shadows suggest the menace and threat of the unknown. Not a window is to be seen; the buildings seemingly turn in upon themselves to elude a world that they shun. Both edifices and locales share an ambivalence in time and space - we could be witnessing the Eldorado of the Incas or the ruined city in Paul Auster's prophetic novel, In the Country of Last Things. Murdoch's paintings serve to confuse, obscure and mystify, and like the world of dreams - which might be their closets reference - seem to offer only the slenderest of concession to reality, a fantasy world whose hold on the real waxes and wanes but is never truly resolved. Where their hold on reality wanes, her paintings approach abstraction. The structural forms here - the volumes, edges and interstices - suggest those pictorial strategies favoured by the Rayonists, or the Constructivists, Larionov, Lissitsky, Malevich, et al. We are invited into these scenes, but not welcomed.