Rousseau in Aotearoa

QT Museum Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand · 2010

This 11-metre-long mural, commissioned in 2010 by the then-owner of the Museum Hotel as a personal homage to Henri Rousseau, one of his favourite artists, reinterprets three of the Douanier’s celebrated jungle paintings in the distinctive visual language of Heimler and Proc.

The artists heighten and clarify the colour palette, flooding the composition with luminous greens, vivid pinks and radiant blues so that this large-scale artwork stands in deliberate chromatic counterpoint to the dark tones of the building. They also rework the central odalisque, transforming Rousseau’s exotic figure into a more classical Greek ideal of the nude. The result is a vibrant, contemporary dialogue with the naïve master’s tropical dreamscapes, lush, theatrical and full of quiet wonder.