“Landscape is at the core of María José Benvenuto’s paintings, however the particularities of this terrain have undergone a radical transformation over the past 12 months. Benvenuto is Chilean, and in late 2018 swapped her home city of Santiago de Chile, situated in a valley surrounded by mountain ranges, for the scrubby bushland and oceanic horizons of Sydney’s Northern Beaches. For an artist whose practice had, up until that point, been informed by the imposing peaks which looked down on her previous home, it was the endless vistas of Sydney’s landscape which struck her. Where previously Benvenuto’s works had alluded to the contrast between commanding natural landmarks and the small humans living in their shadows, Benvenuto now found herself looking out, and out, and out – at the landscape through her studio window in Manly comprised of layers and layers of foliage through foreground, middle-ground and background.”