eX de Medici is always on an edge. The edge of dissent, of controversy, of resistance, of anger and revolt. She analyses the follies of the world, watches, listens and reads compulsively, intensively following debates, philosophies, events and controversies. War, environmental damage, violence against women, societal shifts, Big Pharma, injustices of any kind prompt her to rage, and to finely delineate in her art multiple juxtapositions of the saccharine with the odious. Like Grayson Perry, she draws the viewer in with conventional beauty and then delivers the sucker punch of political reality. Like a fever dream, the work embraces confrontation and induces contemplation.

de Medici’s latest body of work, Blue For Boys, following hard on the heels of her extraordinary forty-year retrospective at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in 2023, is full of her signature firecracker energy. Her obsessive works explode off the smooth paper they are skilfully painted on. One in particular, Hard Centre, has a deep black-blue box at its centre which seems as if it might pulse at you and silently absorb your brain while you observe it. It could be an analogy for our experience of the internet, A.I. and the electronic future we are living in as our servant becomes our master, and our slave becomes a bully. With recent technology, rather than directing what happens, we are all too often being told what to do. Thus, rather than our horizons expanding, they are being tightened around us.

Reading, watching, listening, scrolling, scanning, posting, commenting, sharing, tweeting – people have never been more connected and never more apart. The utopian promise of the internet – a forum for multiple voices, a paradise of openness and freedom – has sadly, all too often, become a place of fear and abuse, paranoia, anonymous violence and hatred. de Medici is impelled to observe and examine this can of worms, to ponder the dark side, to wade in where angels fear to tread.

Pandora’s Box is a Greek myth that I recall hearing and reading as a child. Pandora is given a box and told to not open it. She disobeys and, in so doing, unleashes bad human qualities–greed, anger, deceit, pride, envy, aggression–which immediately fly off around the world to do evil. Yet, something small and quiet then emerges from the box: hope. This is what I remember most about the story - the presence of hope.

de Medici’s method of using a traditional art medium – watercolour and tempera on paper – to make confronting statements is well-known. The artist spends long hours looking through a microscope and paints with signature precision. She has a deep admiration for the observational work of botanical illustrator Ferdinand Bauer. Her own technique has been established by finely tattooing human skin over many years as well as twenty years of studying and painting in great detail the colours, scales and structures of miniature moths from the CSIRO Collection. Science enthrals her in its endless encounters with the world, its measuring, its hypotheses, its obsessiveness. Yet we can observe a notable contradiction between her extreme demonstration of control in a world where control often seems illusory.

Juxtaposed with de Medici’s depiction of actual weapons are symbolic and decorative elements that she creates out of molecules and atoms. In Blue for Boys the guns used by various tough guys are spliced together to make new hybrid weapons. Other details in these new works include cherries, flowers, voids and sickly-sweet wallpaper. They are combined with molecules of various chemicals or medications such as testosterone, estrogen, estradiol, progesterone, cortisol, Viagra, methane, morphine, dopamine, serotonin, Xanax, lithium, all of which we may have once not known about, but which are now often prominent in our newsfeeds. Many if not most of these chemicals, whether manufactured or arising naturally, have become weaponised in a world of relentless confrontation.

In Paris’s Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages, the tapestries of The Lady and the Unicorn, created around 1500 A.D, surround the visitor in a special room. Each tapestry references one of the five senses: touch, taste, scent, hearing and sight. The sixth sense is still mysterious. The millefleur (thousand flowers) scattered over their backgrounds are also often present on medieval manuscripts. Like the early 21st-century the Middle Ages struggled with a plague – the Black Death, with predictions and premonitions of imminent apocalypse, with war, inequality and injustice. Like a medieval scribe, de Medici sits for long hours at her work and carefully limns the complex repetitive imagery with which she points at some of the most controversial issues of our time.

Like many highly successful artists, de Medici has a deep appreciation of mortality. It is instrumental in enabling her long days and nights of concentration. She is insistent on leaving a trace of her life. Her constant rage and despair at injustice are ever-present in both her artworks and conversation yet she says that her anxiety is softening with age. It seems to me that, as with the notable medieval writer and anchorite Julian of Norwich, who caught and recovered from the Black Death in 1373, de Medici will have to say in the end that “all will be well.” Hope is the last thing in Pandora’s Box and the children need to hear it.