Ames Yavuz presents Buoy, a solo exhibition by Guido Maestri.
Guido Maestri’s last exhibition for Ames Yavuz, Planet Telex (2023), looked outward at a collapsing world refracted through the endless digital image stream. With Buoy, Maestri turns inward, charting a more intimate cartography. Where the earlier works sifted landscapes from online detritus, Buoy takes its bearings from the artist’s own literal and emotional tides, following a seismic shift in his living environment and personal life.
Earlier this year, Maestri moved to a boat-access-only house on Pittwater, Ku-ring-gai National Park. Every departure and return now demands a crossing. This small but significant voyage has transformed his sense of place, time and movement. It’s also fed into the work’s recurring motifs: reflections, waterways, dead trees rising from the shallows, and navigational buoys; those bright markers whose colour and shape signal safe passage or changed conditions.
Buoys carry a double meaning here: as maritime tools, they tether the floating to the fixed. They also speak to the artist’s own condition: adrift but held, suspended between states. Maestri’s weeks are now split between three distinct terrains: the new Pittwater home with his son, the Marrickville studio where he paints, and the bush-lined Yarra River in Melbourne with his partner. Each place imprints its distinct textures into paint, rearranged on the picture plane as Maestri’s new network of belonging.
A centrepiece of the exhibition is a vessel made with his son, a raft cobbled together from scavenged material. This vessel anchors the show as a talisman of shared invention and play, echoing the makeshift engineering of both boats and paintings. Canvases unfurl imagined environments that, while rooted in lived experience, are not direct transcriptions. As before, Maestri uses collage to stage compositions in the studio, but this time the source material draws less from global image feeds and more from his immediate world: Pittwater’s mirror-green waters, the Yarra’s muddy tangle of roots, the skeletal silhouettes of habitat trees left standing for parrots to roost.
The work’s painterly logic mirrors the artist’s own restless, nonlinear thinking. Maestri describes his process as “a big scattered mess of ideas” that coalesce intuitively on canvas. Each painting becomes a visual analogue of this drift — fragments, collisions, sudden turns — where navigational symbols, floating forms, and dislocated landscapes jostle and jolt for space. The result is both unsettled and assured, like a vessel finding its way without a plotted course.
If Planet Telex grappled with nature’s digital remediation, Buoy drifts into the business of navigation. Maestri is learning a new language of signs, trusting the tether even as he feels the pull of the open current. In maritime code, yellow buoys mark changed conditions. For Maestri, they mark a life in flux, where endings carve hollows that become shelters for new life. These paintings, like the boat which is the heart of the show, occupy that in-between state: buoyant yet tethered, adrift yet sure enough to ride whatever tide comes next
— Daniel Mudie Cunningham