29/05/2026
Artwork by Seabastion Toast | Rhodopis | 2026 | oil on canvas, framed | 121 x 91cm
Rhodopis is the name given to one of the earliest recorded Cinderella figures, a Greek slave in ancient Egypt whose sandal was carried off by an eagle and delivered to the pharaoh, who traced her by the shoe and made her his queen. The story is about transformation through an unlikely set of circumstances, and about the way beauty and fate become entangled in the telling.
Toast takes the name and gives it to a pale horse standing in a lily pond, its reflection broken by the flowers crowding the water around its legs. Behind it, the dark mass of cypress trees and the ornate caps of garden posts suggest a formal European setting: somewhere old, cultivated, layered with history. The horse itself is painted with a loose, searching brushstroke that captures the animal's mass and luminosity without fixing it entirely, as though it might dissolve back into the paint at any moment.
This is Toast working at her most expansive. The painting commands the room it occupies, and it needs that scale for what it is attempting: the proposition that the beautiful and the strange can inhabit the same image without one cancelling the other. The horse is entirely real and utterly improbable. The setting is specific and dreamlike at once. The painting holds all of it, deliberately, in careful and unapologetic tension.
‘Entry Point’ on until Friday 5 June at Flinders Lane Gallery. Online now https://www.flg.com.au/exhibition/entry-point
