Chris Barr
 
 
 
   

 

 

 

 

 

 

> City Breaks Statement <

> Curriculum Vitae <

 

 

Address:
18 Albany Rd, Basement Flat,
Montpelier
Bristol, BS6 5LH.
Telephone: 07968 745 781.
Email: crstofr2000@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

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Painting no longer represents realities, the fetish of its presence has run dry.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.