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Noël Skrzypczak is an alchemist of form. Often starting with an image collected from a newspaper or ink drawing, landscapes soon become sculptural toxic oozes that both lure and repel. First impressions of Skrzypczak's wall and ground works oscillate somewhere between feeling the need to stand well back - and perhaps don a radioactive safety suit - and the desire to freefall into her unending vortex of colour and viscosity.

Amped-up colour meets pop psychology in the artist's Rorschach inkblot-inspired works. In works such as Champagne apocalypse with diamantes, 2008, landscape and disaster meet the chromatically vibrant worlds of consumerism, advertising and fashion. Dripping, pooling and congealing paint, Skrzypczak's gestural skins also engage with the tradition of painting, summoning the wild legacy of American abstract expressionism, with nods ranging from the cave paintings of Lascaux to Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520-23, in the process swirling up painting's long history and taking a colourful swipe at the medium's often foretold endgame

Skrzypczak's formalist approach exerts the full power of her materials in psychedelic, free-form works, encouraging the kind of everyday transcendental moments that one might experience in finding figures in clouds. Though one could happily remain lost in her technical mastery and the joy of seeing her animated materials frozen in time, Skrzypczak's clear and often dooming titles generate pathos and push her work into the realm of environmental discourse ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Winter 2009 issue.