Concrete Playground

Wanderlust: getting itchy dust in your travel knickers. Kissing your mum goodbye and bikies, Euro-gays, gypsies, dreadlocked backpackers, earnest eco-warriors, conservatives, Mongolian goat herds and endless strange and wonderful vistas hello. If wanderlust is the desire to travel, what is wonderlust? The desire to ponder why?

Spray can artist Xenz, or Graeme Brusby, has been described as the Monet of graffiti, and his first solo exhibition outside of London, Wonderlust, similarly shows a love for flowers, nature, water, all that jazz. But you can’t really imagine the portly French Impressionist skulking about the darkened streets of Bristol, his pants splattered with paint, surveillance cams swivelling like mad. Brusby enjoys the tension — while still loyal to his spray can, his work is more often seen these days on shiny gallery walls, replete with cutesy, Disney-esque bower birds, wisps of golden light, butterflies, fairy wrens and feathers. So just like a surf 'n' turf — double the flavours in one mouthful — you get to be street and serene at the same time.

Wonderlust also references another bewhiskered elder, botanical illustrator John Gould, who, like Brusby, was a Brit obsessed with Aussie ornithology, resulting in the now seminal 19th century book, Birds of Australia. The gallery is quick to point out that this is only Gould if you spiked his tea with 700 spoonfuls of magic mushroom. Chubby, lollipop-hued parakeets sit against an achingly blue Australian sky, blue lagoons fade into the misty horizon, and in the back of the gallery, a mirror adorned with fronds and flowers puts you in amongst it all. But you do wonder, would it be a little too sickly sweet if Xenz hadn’t done the hard yards in graffiti first? Maybe Monet would know.