Practice Statement
Chris Barr
My practice has evolved certain painterly conventions
as fetishistic activities in order to question how a
painting might be seen once the act of seeing into it
is abandoned. Through operating in the same tangible space as the
viewer the quasi-pictorial nature of my work can evoke a physical
gesture rather than a contemplative gaze. Yet there is a desire
to allow functional origins to co-exist with the overall formal
energy of the artwork itself so that an almost innate mental image
is created. How much bulk can sail under the banner of painting?
It becomes clear in drawing distinctions between the
ideal and the actual that in respect to
craft objects industry is capable of creating thoroughly artificial
fetish objects as a result of the untouched quality
bestowed to them through their mechanical production. I like to
play on this schism between the idealised notion behind an
object and the failure of the object in attaining this supposed
fetishistic function.
Painting no longer represents realities, the fetish of its presence
has run dry. As a crudely constructed compromise for those unwilling
to go the whole way, artistic gestures might aim to establish matter
as fact in a manner that questions assumed boundaries between what
is real and what is abstract fiction. In the very least my work
serves to expose the contract that visual society has made with
the necessity of transcendence.
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