Bob Barron at the Red Box Gallery

Newcastle upon Tyne, 9 July-4 Sept 2009

A solo exhibition consisting of 34 works using discarded packaging material and old roof slates weathered and shaped by exposure to the elements, assembled in a certain order, torn, stained, scratched or etched into.

In situ at Red Box
Click on the image to view a larger version
Photo: Christopher Prior
In situ at Red Box
Click on the image to view a larger version
Photo: Christopher Prior
In situ at Red Box
Click on the image to view a larger version
Photo: Christopher Prior
In situ at Red Box
Click on the image to view a larger version
Photo: Christopher Prior

ARTIST'S STATEMENT: If my work is about anything, I think it may be an attempt to express vague musings about the passage of time made corporeal through certain images and surfaces; the unfathomable time from which we have emerged, Deep Time; the more immediate time of our recent forebears, Century; the slow pulse of time during the early hours when lights are dimmed so as not to disturb a sleeping household, 4am; a momentary fragment of time when three young women run from the sea, moments that are never to be repeated in the same way ever again, Bathers.

When I say I only think the work may have something to do with the comprehension of time, however, it is because one can never be fully explicit about any work of art. There is always something at one remove, something which cannot be quite pinned down. All the constructs in art we build to describe a thought or feeling are, of necessity, parts of the map and not the territory.

My art has little to say about the world of today, but I would be quite happy to see it as a place of retreat as it is a deliberate remove from a digitally manipulated, glossy everything, advertising culture with an emphasis on instant gratification. I use card that has often been used as packaging for this consumerist society and then discarded. I am not interested in impact as such, but work that reveals itself over time.

According to the Maurice Denis dictum, “before being a horse, a nude or some sort of anecdote, a work of art is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order”. So, first and foremost I suppose, my work is essentially about the material I use, assembled in a certain order, torn, stained, scratched or etched into.

I like the idea of working with slate because of the age and nature of the material. Slate is of sedimentary origin, formed from the deposits of minerals collected on the beds of ancient seas millions of years ago. Movement of the earth's crust, retreating seas or whatever, eventually pushed these ancient sea beds to the surface where their deposits were quarried by man to provide shelter from the winds and the rain. I like handing this material, and the way in which the surface has been worn by its exposure to the elements and marked by human made deposits into the atmosphere. I am interested in the journey from the sea bed to the quarry, from the quarry to the roof top and from the roof top to the art work. To this extent the pieces are about the slate itself but I am also, again, attempting to evoke some feeling of time, ancient landscapes perhaps; something elemental but without any New Age mysticism attached.

Writing about Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series of paintings, Robert Hughes wrote that one heard “neither the chant of surging millions, nor even the chorus of a movement, but one measured voice, quietly and tersely explaining why this light, this colour, this intrusion of a 30 degree angle into a glazed and modulated field might be valuable in the life of the mind and of feeling.”

I am interested in the life of the mind and of feeling, but, nevertheless, people confronting the work will make of it what they will.

REVIEW: Richard H. Roberts, Emeritus Visiting Professor, School of Languages, Cultures and Religions, University of Stirling

Bob Barron is an artist living and working in North East England. His work resists all seduction and is essentially ascetic. In short, Barron's work amounts to an invitation to engage in the same kind of stripping away of sentimental camouflage that his art embodies. This may not be an alluring prospect; but the remarkable impact of this exhibition is both immediate and enduring. Having entered the silent electronic gates that guard the architectural practice that houses the Red Box Gallery in Newcastle, we then pass through heavy plate glass doors and emerge into an aquarium-like space, a high atrium with a dark, polished serpentine green floor that reflects the structure above. The milieu of the Red Box Gallery, a Tate Modern in microcosm, instantly creates a vertiginous sense of height and depth that can trigger an oceanic awareness: this is the perfect setting for Barron's pieces. In the gallery the visitor is as it were suspended like fish, floating between light and stygian depths. The spatial effect is so powerful that our encounter with Barron's beautifully hung and lit compositions in subtly-tinted, stripped cardboard and worked slate comes almost as a relief. The reality is that two uncompromising forces meet: the deep space of the architecture matches Barron's equally powerful evocations of deep time. Action and reaction being equal, as participants we are free to move into the horizontally opened fragilities and infinities of time opened by the works. The contrasting media of prepared cardboard and recovered slate cohabit in yet another primordial confrontation between the ephemeral and the archaic. Bob Barron disavows explicit religious or spiritual affiliations, and whilst we may respect this restraint, I believe that he nonetheless requires us to descry (“to catch sight of from a distance, to investigate and explore” OED). Such a process touches upon liminality, proximity to the threshold of the unconscious - and to second sight - but for Barron's purposes it is sufficient that the active imagination is activated. However, in a contemporary culture of seduction, passive consumption and relentless colonisation of the imagination, a definite re-activation of this faculty is required; it is the combination of a superb gallery space with Barron's intense mature work that precipitates this catalytic effect. Once our inner journey begins then the inscape of the imagination can be fed by the striated riches of torn cardboard and tenderly anointed slate. Barron is in effect a shaman-artist, one who undertakes a lonely and painful journey on behalf of his community and forebears. He facilitates the transmutation of the etched soot stains of the Industrial Revolution on archaic slates that sheltered nameless labouring humankind into landscapes of the infinite. As the great Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid observed, such work fulfils the true function of culture in that it unites the universal with the particular. Moreover, Barron's artistic achievement is that he renders this union an experiential possibility for those with eyes to see. His work amounts to an act of love, an active memorial to the value of a myriad human lives; this is a truly democratic art. There is, nonetheless, a price of entry: we must cease to be mere observers and become witnesses. This outstanding exhibition should not to be missed.

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