Emily Kam Kngwarray’s exhibition at the Tate Modern in London this year renewed discussions about whether Aboriginal contemporary painting can be contextualised alongside its European counterparts. Daniel Browning wrote expertly for Art Review in response to the temptation to flatten Kngwarray’s deeply meaningful representations of Country and dreaming. For this reason—plus the equally potent discussions around the introduction of watercolour to desert artists and the origins of the Hermannsburg school—it feels fraught to seek aesthetic comparisons for Charles Jangala Inkamala’s recent paintings and ceramics on display in his solo exhibition Lines of Country | West Hermannsburg to Papunya, now on at Vivien Anderson Gallery.

The exhibition catalogue suggests that the works have some echo of the bold colours and lines of Fauvism, a movement whose familiar names include Henri Matisse and Andrè Derain. The latter expressed in 1906 a wish to create images that “belong to all time,” a statement that reminds me partly of the cyclical nature of belonging between First Peoples and Country. Initially bristling against the introduction Western art terminologies given the Tate context, the Derain quote intrigued me enough to let this suggestion float around the back of my mind as I entered the space.

The electric blue in Inkamala’s palette gives a nod to one of his famous forebears, but the mountains he paints have a completely different attitude to Namatjira’s watercolour ranges. Using vibrant colours to paint his mother’s Papunya Country at Mount Sonder and Glen Helen Gorge, his use of undulating lines defies typical representations of the mountains of his father’s Country at Ntaria (Hermannsburg) and The Gap, just outside Mparntwe (Alice Springs) and where he now lives.

Since his 2022 solo exhibition at Araluen Art Centre, Inkamala has settled into a distinctive point of view and visual language within his painting practice. Having come to painting in 2017, after working for the council and with cattle and horses at Hermannsburg, his strong connection to the land on his paternal and maternal sides is expressed vividly through colour and his play with perspective and form. He is one of Central Australia’s rising artists, a finalist in the 2025 AGNSW Wynne Prize and for the NATSIAAs in 2021, 2022, and 2024.

Long, narrow canvases wrap around Vivien Anderson’s St Kilda gallery space in a vibrant frieze, with several larger canvases, equally brilliant, standing taller than the others. A few ceramic pieces are interspersed between the paintings. Yet it’s the oblong works that give me pause with their viewfinder-like captures of Country. There’s something about this aspect ratio that feels true to the way vast landscapes in remote areas are experienced in the body. Country stretches further and further in every direction. There’ll always be something out of sight, or off canvas, in this instance. This endless sensation is something early painters of the Australian landscape wanted to capture ever since European-style painting was brought here. Depictions of what they saw portrayed an overwhelming, untamable landscape. The suite of works on display in Vivien Anderson have none of the constraints of such allegorical painting. Here, Inkamala simply allows Country to dance.

West of Hermannsburg (2025) is a study in green. Skyline and mountain-top blend here, as blue from the sky seeps its way into the crags of the mountain, which are emphasised on the vertical axis. Alongside the use of cool colours to represent the ranges, the lines remind the viewer that millennia ago, these mountains were once alive, their layers formed by liquid lava. The skill is at once an adept understanding of perspective as much as a deep knowledge of Country.

This inversion of line is a visual motif repeated through the exhibition. It’s used to create a domineering effect on within The Gap, Mparntwe (Alice Springs) (2024), where perspective explodes between two outcrops that meet over the road in the Mparntwe suburb. They are given the texture of gemstones or geodes to create depth and shape. Pleasingly, the same scene can be contrasted to his 2025 paintings of the same location, which approach the site from different aspects and viewpoints. In The Gap (2025), there’s a touch more pink in the sky, the mountains appear bluer, there’s a plain beyond on the tarmac, and instead of geodes it’s suburban roads that spill asphalt down the canvas like lava. The mountain-line changes as I turn around the room, softening in Through the Gap, Alice Springs (2025) and sharpening up with the red tones of Alice Springs (Mparntwe) (2025).

Both the suburban and rural towns in Inkamala’s pictures are composed of squashy little houses with domed roofs, cross-hatched windows, and rounded details on walls and windows. Several of these structures have been reproduced as ceramics, mounted on the walls between the canvases. The Ntaria-Hermannsburg housing is distinguished by a white exterior, typical of the structures that Lutheran missionaries built in the town centre. They feel anthropomorphic, as houses often can, with windows for eyes and a door for a mouth. The forms seem to echo the mountain shape, particularly in those depictions of The Gap, another example of Inkamala’s understanding of how scale can be used to comic effect.

It feels like observing a wink exchanged between the artist and his Country, this relationship being stronger and deeper than the ephemeral, animated houses–though they are indeed charming. Parallels between the shapes of the mountains and the shapes of the shelters below them prompt the questions: Which is the real shelter? What is really protecting, or protected by, those who live here? Sites of Country are intimately known by this artist. From the sacred to the secret, there is a cyclical knowledge emanating from these pictures, between the man-made and the land-made.

The same flowing lines used to represent vertical and linear rock formations in the mountain ranges across the exhibition are the same used in the extraordinary piece Glen Helen, Mission Days (2025). This painting is of Country north of Ntaria-Hermannsburg and west of Mparntwe, a popular tourist site with a gorge and a waterhole. The painting has all the characteristic liveliness of line and colour of the other works. The sky flows into the river—full and blue in this rendering. This river-line is the geographical connector between Ntara-Hermannsburg down the Larapinta trail alongside the Finke River, from Inkamala’s mother’s country at Papunya. In this hang, there are fewer interpretations of his mother’s Country, contrasted against the Ntaria and Mparntwe pieces. However, the Rwetyepme or Mount Sonder, one of the Territory’s highest peaks, with its multi-toned blue body, pink-tipped peaks and textured foothills, fittingly acts like the pinnacle of the exhibition.

Speaking at his 2022 solo exhibition in Mparntwe, Charles said: “All the people got different law. All the men, the Tjilpi, they know Country. They know place. Every place. (…) Us people have been here for a long time.” Among the many obvious differences between painters like Derain and Inkamala, the body of work represented in Lines of Country consists of images of land that already belong to all time and the people who belong with it. Here, the relationship between the image, its subject, and its creator, is not simply cyclical, but reciprocal, one of care and deep knowledge. These are paintings that offer a glimpse at this lively, ever-changing relationship. In this exhibition, Charles Inkamala shows that he has already begun leaving his unique, indelible mark on contemporary painting.