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Chris Barnard’s paintings represent an ongoing examination of the connections and gaps between landscape painting and contemporary socio-political events. More specifically, focusing on the manifestations of American expansion and its consequences on various environments. When viewed together, these paintings suggest a looming, pervasive military presence. However, represented indirectly to address, without celebrating, the violence caused by U.S. military action. These allusive works are intended to blur the boundaries between civilian and militarized landscapes to provoke the viewer to ‘see’ this violence where we may not be expected. In doing so, Barnard attempts to re-sensitize himself and viewers to its grave consequences. 

Formally, Barnard continues to manipulate the tools of perspective, color and paint quality. Many paintings place the viewer in a particular position in relation to what s/he sees, alluding to how one’s positionality—where one ‘stands’ or where one ‘is coming from’—determines so much about how one ‘views’ the world. In addition, many of these compositions (and the brush strokes and re-used palette scrapings that constitute them) imply repetition or a cycle, hinting at the recurring nature of the conflicts in which we are presently mired.

By broadening color range and surface/paint textures, it draws attention to the idea of surfaces and representation—what is real, what is made up, and specifically how can a painting ‘accurately’ deal with issues of conflict, violence and death, if at all? Paint’s myriad formal qualities have the power to engross and/or distract a viewer, and Barnard chooses to make paintings about conflict that exhibit some internal struggle. Imagery often vies with formal aspects for the viewer’s attention, mirroring the inherent conflict between an artwork’s subject matter and its representation. In this way Barnard brings the idea of focus—the artist’s, the viewer’s, this country’s—into question, as he continues to explore the role and act of painting as a way to engage with current events.

Toward Trinity continues Chris Barnard’s personal and passionate exploration of the gap between the visible and invisible aspects of military representations and war time realities. Questioning the systems that celebrate destructive force and technological achievement, and the subversive measures used to eclipse the darker side of imperialist motives, Toward Trinity offers a fresh exploration of power and spectatorship.  It is an examination of contemporary American culture - one that is increasingly in a state of militarization and perpetual war - questioning the underlying structures of power that are framing the discussion and our understanding of these issues. Barnard implicates the role of art and visual culture in the process of social conditioning, exposing strategies that paradoxically disguise while also disclosing information.  Employing techniques and mechanisms inherent to different pictorial traditions, such as history painting (popularly utilized to glorify imperial conquests), American 19th-century landscape painting (used to invoke Manifest Destiny, an ideological dominion over the land), and European religious paintings (produced to convey reverence and incite obedience), Barnard’s new work addresses the contentious relationship between the veneration of the American military-industrial complex and the ecological damage and human suffering caused by it.
 
Formally, Barnard has been developing a style of painting that offers various levels of representation and abstraction; some are tightly rendered in a realist manner and others are painted more loosely with “painterly pixilation” and dripping striations that simultaneously hide the subjects as it reveals them. Using space, color and texture, he draws attention to issues of surface and substance—what is real, what is fabricated, and how media affect its interpretation.  In the painting Holy Ghost, inspired by images culled from the public domain of a Reaper drone (a pilot-less war plane), Barnard offers a commentary on the stealthy and detached methods through which missiles are deployed in the “War on Terror”, yet also points out the publicly accessible mediums through which this information circulates.  In other paintings based on photographs taken by the artist of vast desert landscapes and aircraft hangars, he brings into focus those over-shadowed or intentionally ignored aspects of military operations by juxtaposing clarity with abstraction.
 

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