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It’s uncanny to see an exhibition by John Citizen. I like to think I have good taste in contemporary design, particularly modernist minimal interior design, and Citizen’s paintings are enticing; he could furnish my apartment any day. The temptation to buy was overwhelming – I agonised over ‘Blue Vase’ but found them too disturbing:  what’s with the contrasting feature walls or the colours – such a discordant palette! How could you live with the coloured people – that is the paintings within the paintings? Oversized and outlandish, these figures disrupt the formal tone of the living spaces. Everything about Citizen’s Coloured People is disconcerting: painted in outline they are patchily described and inharmoniously rendered with grey clothes and lurid, almost sickly faces. It is as if Citizen has based them on second or third hand degraded reproductions, you would not want to be one of his subjects!

The creator of these ‘Party People’ has been playful also, including in his interiors versions of works painted as Gordon Bennett (ooh, should I let the cat out of the bag??). These mini simulations — the striped paintings or footprint rug — are at home in their contexts, being marketable culture that evokes connections with Australian indigenous art, American abstract painting or the 1940s textile and furnishing patterns by Margaret Preston that relied on Indigenous art for its inspiration. Citizen’s art looks good but it never lets you forget that we all inhabit each other’s cultural space.