This exhibition contains the fine distillation of Jo Bertini’s intimate, long engagement with the Australian desert. This landscape lies beyond our daily experience, but it has always haunted our imagination. The desert is a hard master. Once burnt by its uncompromising glare, not many artists return to it, and few see through its harshness to the depths of its strange beauty.

Why is she drawn back to the desert, its aridity and silence, its looming dunes, the colour shifts and dipping perspective of its sandy wastes? The answer must lie in this exhibition, but it isn’t easily revealed.  The clues each painting offers are caught in the heat and sand, the upended colours, the characters and camels which pass into and out of the works, refracted by her art.

Jo paints the desert in the company of scientists and travellers who go there to study and explore it, using it for solace or as a rite of passage. She has another, less definable relationship with the desert, more like a hunger. She’ll draw it and paint it until the light goes, filling sketchbooks day after day until the trip is over. Then the real work begins and the pictures become unsettling companions, demanding resolution and the most painterly attention.

Like Drysdale, Olsen and Nolan, Jo is one of a small band of Australian artists over the decades for whom the desert has become an essential subject, whose paintings resonate from the personal to a wider manifesto, propositions for our collective imagination about this country’s centre. That doesn’t come easily. The struggle is not for control, for taming the desert as others might have tamed the bush - but to expose slender moments of revelation when the desert appears as it is, and the people in it are transformed through being there. The struggle involves a lot of paint, much building up and paring back, overlaying shade, pouring in light, inventing colours - doubling and halving them, until the moment arrives when you see the desert just as Jo does.  The result is powerful and transformative. A few minutes alone with these paintings and the authorised, realist version of the arid landscape slips away, and we are facing the beautiful, strange desert of our imagination, once again.