SOLO EXHIBITION RETROSPECTIVE:

‘Exploded Lines: Colour, Tone and Texture’
Latrobe Art Space, 134 Latrobe Terrace, Paddington QLD 4064
13 - 18 September 2022

Gathering together a selection of recent work from British painter Simon Barwick, ‘Exploded Lines: Colour, Tone and Texture’ is a comprehensive look at the ways in which Barwick continues to interrogate the complex relationships between the various fundamental elements of his own painting practice.

Working predominately with the line as his primary unit of expression, Barwick’s work is as interested in enacting simplification through an almost minimalist reduction as it is in pushing one or another of its formal components (colour, tone, texture) to a kind of breaking point. The results of this somewhat dichotomous approach to painting allow us to see a single artist coming at his own aesthetic predispositions from multiple angles: an extended scrape; a crisp line; a proliferation of colour; a meditation on a single aspect of a vast palette.

Underlying all of Barwick’s work is a deep love of painting itself—of shape and colour—as well as a singular fascination with the expressive potential of what can be achieved in a given composition merely through the juxtaposition of a flat plane and a textured plane, through the careful balancing of different tones within the perceptual field of a single canvas.

Text by David Thomas

Fox Trot? (2019)

A demonstration of loose control, Fox Trot? brings Barwick’s unique style face-to-face with one of his early influences - Piet Mondrian. The formal elements are combined with loose brushwork to bring a calming balance to this framed lozenge painting.

Fox Trot? Oil on Canvas. 36” / 91.5cm square. $2400. Signed on the back, in Tasmanian oak box frame and ready to hang.

Unwelcomed Visitors (2021-2022)

One can see a great deal of Barwick’s visual vocabulary on display in the six paintings comprising Unwelcomed Visitors.
Taking their names from songs that have had an influence on the artist, the works in this series foreground gesture as a key element of the finished composition.
However, rather than using that gestural quality simply to suggest the presence of the artist at work (as in abstract expressionism), the most expansively gestural paintings here—Darkness Falls, Casting Shadows On The Wall (2022), Sound So Ominously Tearing Through The Silence I Cannot Move (2021) and What’s That Dreadful Rumble. Won’t Somebody Tell Me What I Hear (2021)—work in concert with the other somewhat more restrained paintings in the series to suggest those aspects of Barwick’s vocabulary that aren’t as explicitly present.
If Barwick’s primary unit is the line, then Unwelcomed Visitors deconstructs that primary unit to varying degrees, resulting in works that are as playfully alive as they are intensely unbridled.

All paintings Oil on Canvas. 48”x36” / 122x91.5cm. $3000. Signed on the back and ready to hang.

I'm Hearing Images, I'm Seeing Songs. $3000. Oil on Canvas, 48"x36" / 122x91.5cm. Signed on back and ready to hang

I Hid A Part Of Me Away. $3000. Oil on Canvas, 48"x36" / 122x91.5cm. Signed on back and ready to hang

What's That Dreadful Rumble? Won't Somebody Tell Me What I Hear? $3000. Oil on Canvas, 48"x36" / 122x91.5cm. Signed on back and ready to hang

Sound So Ominously Tearing Through the Silence I Cannot Move. $3000. Oil on Canvas, 48"x36" / 122x91.5cm. Signed on back and ready to hang

Lying In A Lonely Bed Staring At The Ceiling. $3000. Oil on Canvas, 48"x36" / 122x91.5cm. Signed on back and ready to hang

Darkness Falls, Casting Shadows On The Wall. $3000. Oil on Canvas, 48"x36" / 122x91.5cm. Signed on back and ready to hang

Centre Yourself.
Take Two Steps Back.
Centre Yourself.
(2022)

The title of the series Centre Yourself. Take Two Steps Back. Centre Yourself. (2022) is as much a command as it is both a riddle and a clue.

As the white or near-white spaces at the centre of the canvases carefully modulate the viewer’s relationship to colour and tone, what initially reads almost as negative space gradually begins to operate as perceptual field, with the eye pulling the colour from the edges to the middle, allowing for a different way of seeing, indirect and incredibly charged.

The subject of the paintings might best be understood as the complicated nature of perception itself. To first centre oneself in space and time, to find a sense of calm from which to perceive the work, and to then assume a new vantage point a couple of steps back before looking.

But then to centre oneself differently: to place oneself at the centre of the work, rather than outside of it, no longer looking at the work but looking at oneself looking, perceiving the way in which colour is perception, and the way in which one’s own way of seeing is the work.

All paintings Oil on Canvas. 36”x24” / 91.5x61cm.
$2100.
Signed on the back and ready to hang.

Pink Field (White)
Cream Field (Green)
White Field (Purple)
White Field (Yellow/ Blue)

MoMA (2020)

A deeply conceptual impulse underlies the deceptively simple paintings in the MoMA series, named as a whole to reflect Barwick’s having painted them while remotely studying through the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Executed as a way to better understand the tools and methods of the various artists he was looking at—and with their individual titles all coming from different friends and acquaintances of the artist—the resulting body of work speaks quietly to the interpersonal nature of artistic practice and to the way in which an artist’s vision can’t help but be informed by the influence of others.

All paintings Oil on Canvas. 12”x9” / 30.5x23cm. $350. Signed on the back and ready to hang.

The Gouldian Finches (2020)

Three birds—the gouldian finches from which this series of three paintings takes its name. Three birds, each looked at in such a way as to become simply colour and movement, though a movement suggested—felt—rather than explicitly portrayed. See the way a head of such deep, intense red (Red-headed Finch (2020)) manages to come through even when completely abstracted. See the way movement is conveyed through the orientation of each painting’s lines within the compositional field—the longest lines traversing almost from one corner to its diagonal opposite, quietly suggesting that the shorter lines to the left and right might somehow continue on beyond the edges of the painting. There’s a dynamism to the way our attention is pulled in multiple directions simultaneously, the gaze travelling laterally at the same time as it moves from top to bottom and back down again. Our eyes flit like birds from one perch to another.

All paintings Oil on Canvas. 9”x12” / 23x30.5cm. $350. Signed on the back and ready to hang.

Ten Studies (2022)

Painted at the start of 2022, the small canvases comprising the series called Ten Studies present a kind of compressed version of Barwick’s visual vocabulary. In works such as Study #10 (2022) and Study #7 (2022) we can see the kind of strongly defined lines that elsewhere get deconstructed in works such as Study #8 (2022) and Study #9 (2022). And while a work such as Study #4 (2022) might at first seem to complete this progression, showing a field that initially reads as almost completely exploded, a second glance begins to suggest that the progression is actually a cycle in which each technique is always in conversation with a deconstructed (or reconstructed) version of itself. Though heavily obscured, the oranges in Study #4 (2022) slowly start to resolve into something that almost suggests a depth of field, vertical lines still operating—organising and shaping and guiding—even beneath the build-up of scrape and texture.

All paintings Oil on Canvas. 8” / 20.5cm square. $300. Signed on the back, in timber box frames and ready to hang.

Three Ages (2021)

The suggestion of a horizon hovers just out of reach in both Orange Blue White (2021) and Yellow White Black Blue (2021). In Orange Yellow Blue (2021), something about the way the colours bleed into one another calls to mind the appearance of the sky at dusk. In Blue Yellow Red White (2021), it’s either sea or sky, maybe both. The eye keeps catching glimpses of things that almost resolve, only to be arrested as it tries to enter these half-visible realities obscured behind shapes and lines in the foreground. As the title of the series suggests, the eight paintings here—each composed in three distinct stages—gesture toward the relationship between youth, middle age and old age: quick development; a straying from where one began; an eventual balance; and the way in which one’s youth is always present even as one grows old, even if the memory is sometimes difficult to recall entirely.

All paintings Oil on Canvas. 24” / 61cm square. $1800. Signed on the back and ready to hang.

After The Rain (2020) & Pastel Stripes (2020)

Whether through tight control (Pastel Stripes), or by using a looser style to push the formal elements of the composition beyond a kind of breaking point (After The Rain), this work is the product of an artist in close conversation with his materials, sensitive to the world around him.

After The Rain. Oil on canvas. 24"/ 61cm square. $1800. Signed on the back and ready to hang.

Pastel Stripes. Oil on canvas. 36"/ 91.5cm square. $2400. Signed on the back and ready to hang.

Hopscotch IV (2021), A Study In White (2020)

Hopscotch IV. Oil on canvas. 24"/ 61cm square. $1800. Signed on the back and ready to hang.

A Study In White. Oil on canvas. 24"/ 61cm square. $1800. Signed on the back and ready to hang.

Leeds (2020), Red, White and Black (after Kazimir Malevich) (2020)

Leeds. Oil on canvas. 9"x12"/ 23x30.5cm. $350. Signed on the back and ready to hang.

Red, White and Black (after Kazimir Malevich). Oil on canvas. 8"x10"/ 20.5x25.5cm. $350. Signed on the back and ready to hang.