Chris Barnard

With a title like Deepwater Horizon, Barnard is explicitly touching on shock-doctrine political, cultural and environmental issues; and sure enough there are references to oil slicks, murky depths and churning, fulminating debris (in the most gorgeously tactile whites, veined with cobalt flecks, pinkish streaks, eliding into watery blues—Barnard is a master of the corrupt, not-quite-white).  In certain respects, this is almost literally rendered imagery. But Barnard is also mining the forbidden terrain of the beauty we find in the pathology, the mythic fail measured by exquisite inflammations, volatile reactions and recombinations.

A focus on contemporary landscape, both real and imaginary, is at the center of Chris Barnard's paintings. At Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Barnard's large romantic paintings are reminiscent of 19th century American landscape art, replete with sweeping vistas and dramatic light. Incorporating tightly rendered imagery with heavy viscosity and saturated colors, Barnard imbues this idealized vision of the American West with forbidding truth. 

The gorgeously painted Revenge is a depiction the Utah desert. What looks to be an empty landscape is, in fact, anything but. This is the site of a secret test area for military drones. In the distance, Barnard has wielded his palette knife to create a sculpted surface of landscape in regurgitation. 

My current body of work (titled Bounty, recently on view at VOLTA NY) explores these contradictions. In these paintings, I engage questions of light and dark, truth and fiction, substance and surface, reality and mythology.  To address these concerns, I evoke the wide vistas, dramatic light, and stunning terrain of romantic landscape painting. However, I work to undermine that romanticism by layering images and materials and, for example, re-framing “heavenly” light and the color white as forces of darkness and portents of sorrow. My hope is that viewers are left wondering about what it is they are looking at—whether projected over, breaking through, covered up, or emerging from behind—and why.

Mother depicts the interior of a massive airplane hangar, with a domed roof spewing out beams of colored light. Our vantage point above the nose of the massive aircraft allows a look inside the cockpit, where a hazy silhouette confronts us. Beneath the wingspan is a crude topographical map suggesting that the airplane, or Mother, has consumed mother earth and replaced its terrain with machinery. Using another familial title with Father (Fat Man), a spherical drone planted on the desert surface emerges from a network of calculated brushstrokes. "Toward Trinity" identifies a newly a realized trinity of the 21st century--the Father, Mother, and Star Child.

Romantic traditions of American landscape painting get apocalyptic comeuppance from our post-nuclear era in eight new paintings by Chris Barnard. Dubbed "Toward Trinity," presumably after the New Mexico blast site where the first nuclear weapon was detonated 66 years ago, the works are a pointedly unhealthful concoction of glamour and destruction, thrilling power and impending ruination.