Nocturnes explores the nature of consciousness and perception through depictions of the industrial landscape at night. Working from photographs, Joshua Charadia builds up layers of oil paint to capture the peculiar beauty of scenes that rarely earn our attention.
As night falls, constellations of lights scatter across coastal ports, and the dense infrastructure of container yards is transformed. Charadia expands on the tradition of the nocturne, a visual, musical, and literary form charged with centuries of creative contemplation, translating the hush and charge of night into paint.
Charadia is a Sydney-based artist whose work casts an aesthetic and critical eye across Australia’s industrial terrain, drawing close to the ubiquitous and overlooked to reveal latent visual complexity. Across oil paint and charcoal, he affords time to images often seen only in passing, locating moments of the sublime in the everyday, and allowing realism and abstraction to sit in productive tension.
