China Heights presents High End Memory, an upcoming exhibition of new works by Creed McTaggart. The scene is 3am in his garage, a threshold space between night and morning. Surfboards line the walls in deliberate arrangement. His two cats bear witness. Half finished projects accumulate around him, a loose and uncontainable archive of memory. Born in Western Australia, grandson of an artist, McTaggart’s practice is guided less by formal discipline than by instinct. A professional surfer and musician, he approaches painting as necessity rather than career. The work is not constructed but extracted, drawn from moments, encounters, and the residue of lived experience.

High End Memory occupies the interval between recollection and invention. These are fragments, half formed, overexposed, softened at the edges. Faces drift in and out of focus, not portraits but impressions. Someone once known. Someone almost recognised. Someone entirely fabricated. Memory, after all, performs an edit. It is selective, embellished, and unreliable. Colours intensify. Details dissolve. What persists is not objective truth but affective residue. McTaggart’s paintings embrace this tension, refusing resolution in favour of a productive blur.

His methodology owes nothing to institutional training. It emerges from quiet geography, intermittent swells, and the gift of a paint box. It comes from music made without commercial ambition, collaborative and incidental and pure. Painting becomes a form of problem solving: a gesture applied, disrupted, and recovered. Mistakes are not failures but generative events. McTaggart approaches the canvas with the same unschooled rigour he brings to a wave or a chord. The studio is a garage. The practice remains unburdened by precedent.

True Stories brings together Antwan Horfee, Harry Rothel, and Ricardo Passaporte. Horfee draws from Menko cards and early manga, plus the blurry energy of a certain animated Fantasia, layering surreal figures over nostalgic kitsch backgrounds of waterfalls and marine scapes. Rothel directs the human figure with dramatic tension and precise control. His palette moves from vivid blues to delicate mauve and pastel, while his underlying language borrows from old master painting filtered through a modernist's impatience. Passaporte works large with airbrush, pulling from mid-century cartoon tropes: a tumbling Tom & Jerry, a pristine suburban lawn with a bulldog launching forward. His flattened decorative compositions are Arkley-esque in their patterned intensity, but the deadpan humour is closer to post-war absurdism. True Stories is a method: three painters, three ways of making a line cut or hold or haze. Each keeps its own tempo, no dilution. Put them together, classical weight with cartoon timing and airbrush haze, and you get a fantastic crescendo, a sum of parts that lands as collusion and chaotic harmony all at once.

Artis Bios

Harry Rothel (b. 1995, Melbourne) directs the human figure like a stage manager with a dark secret. His macabre, extravagant scenes of joy and horror overlapping unfold in soft, muted colours: vivid blues dropping into delicate mauve and pastel. Rothel's imaginative narratives map the human psyche while skewering social convention and contemporary politics. The result is disquieting but never laboured; his acerbic layers of paint move with a modernist's impatience, borrowing from old masters only to cut their line short.

Ricardo Passaporte (b. Lisbon) paints subjects reflecting his interest in branding, advertising, and consumerism. Passaporte, who first worked as a graffiti artist, gained recognition for his series of Pop art-influenced paintings inspired by the German discount retailer Lidl. He has mounted solo exhibitions in Paris, Madrid, Cologne, and Naples, among other cities. His frequent use of airbrush—a reference to his graffiti background—lends his work a hazy appearance and a sense of dispassionate remove. Passaporte also creates sculptures and installations exploring the aesthetics and ubiquity of corporate branding, from Footlocker to Tesco to the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show..

Antwan Horfee (b. 1983, Paris) builds multiple focal points that lead the eye through layered lines and abstract gestures. His hyperreal yet surreal work references B movies, underground comics, and science fiction, with occasional background elements, blurry waterfalls or portraits of his heroes, that anchor the chaos. Horfee's inspirations run from traditional Japanese woodblock printing, including the landscape perspectives of ukiyo (pictures of a floating world), to the rendering techniques of virtual reality and video games. Surreal characters emerge from Menko cards, early manga, and a certain animated fantasia. A graduate of the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris, he has shown at the Palais de Tokyo (2024, 2019), the Lyon Biennale (2019), and Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles (2021). His line never stops moving.

China Heights Gallery presents ERUPTIONS, a survey of recent paintings by Sydney based artist Alex Xerri. The show is offsite at Louis Vuitton Brisbane and brings together twenty two works made over the last four years.

Xerri’s paintings pull from an unusual set of sources. Apex predators, but photographed on clunky early 2000s silver digicams. Fiery sedans. Old video game graphics, the scratchy polygonal kind. Then there are erupting volcanoes, flowing lava, desert nights, and beige computers on fire. She funnels all of this into the studio and builds landscapes from it. The surfaces are rough, acrylic and crushed stone on canvas.

Her references include nature documentaries, car design, and early 3D gaming. She calls the results speculative biomes, places that don’t exist but feel like they could.

A recurring thread in her work is the period around the year 2000. Xerri describes that time as a mix of hangover from the past and excitement for the future. New technology appeared and became obsolete quickly. Her paintings hold onto that tension without nostalgia or irony. They treat outdated objects, silver digicams, blocky game worlds, beige computers, as material worth looking at seriously.

This is Xerri’s first Brisbane exhibition. She has shown solo in Sydney and Nottingham, and in group shows across Australia, the United States, and Europe. Her work is held in private collections internationally.

ERUPTIONS opens 22 April 2026 and runs for three months at Louis Vuitton Brisbane, presented offsite by China Heights Gallery.