David Sequeira

Numbering at over 1,000 works, David Sequeira’s monumental ongoing series Song Cycle highlights his interest in the contemplative qualities of geometry and colour. Painting his intensely coloured geometric forms on manuscript paper, Sequeira points towards their musical resonance. Produced in gouache and pencil, these jewel-like forms have become a daily ritual of making in his West Melbourne studio: “Although I started the series in 2015, the ‘songs’ found resonance during COVID-19 lockdowns. I would paint and post a ‘song’ each day on Instagram and people would message me to share an experience related to the song. Particular songs spoke to particular people, and I sent songs all over the world via snail-mail.”

Each painting has its own title such as Song for Forgiveness and Song for Gentleness, as if colour and geometry can induce feelings and sounds. As a diasporic artist, Sequeira conjugates the dazzling palette of India with the colour vibration of Josef Albers into a distinctive resonant chord impeccably anchored on a sheet of music manuscript. Sequeira’s portals into sonic geometries are rendered in fuchsia, lime green and deep shades of blue with overlapping hues.

“I think about the ‘small acts’ that lie at the heart of my work – painting minute daubs of gouache on paper – as allusions to grand ideas about interconnectedness, wonder, speculation and the nature and experience of reality,” says Sequeira.

340 song paintings were presented in The National 4: Australian Art Now at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2023. Another ongoing series, Other People’s Sky, has recently been shown at ARoS Museum, Denmark. Sequeira is currently working towards a solo exhibition with Bundanon in late June 2025. Grounded in colour and geometry once again, this project will feature a shelf-based glass installation and Sequeira’s new suite of prints, Reach Out and Touch. With a capacious perspective, Sequeira (this time as curator) has amassed 150 artworks from the National Gallery of Victoria’s collection for Floribunda, currently on show at Bunjil Place, Melbourne, adroitly linking !owers with rituals of marriage, mourning and love.