Plinth

The work’s source material, from cranes to insects, are squeezed into eleven paintings. There’s a real sense of tightness without being claustrophobic. One of Barratt’s formal innovations is this ‘bad’ crop, this wonderful finish that makes it difficult to tell what the crop is doing: what it’s removing and keeping in. The paint becomes the context. Take Glovebox, a puzzle with repeating symbols in a framed square. There is what could be a crane in the middle of the painting, flanked by a side-view mirror to its left. Looking closer, there is another crane, smaller than the first, in the bottom left-hand corner of the painting. As the exhibition progresses, these characters (if we can call them that) repeat, yet Barratt’s brushstrokes blur the objects’ contours, rendering them approximate. This brushwork is thick without playing itself up, smart without showing off. The paint is fattened, hidden by other colours, pushed around, scraped and scrubbed. This last method appears often and to similar effect: it’s as if the paintings are trying to unearth themselves. The tiny bumps of the canvases work as a test: you either feel painting or it doesn’t interest you that much. I find myself persuaded by it.

Barratt seems free of the organising prejudice of perspective. It’s at its most evident in Mine, a painting that could at once be described as what you see when you look out of a plane and what you see as you slowly lean your face into a mound of dirt. That type of looking, that moves from distance to proximity, is what these paintings ask of you. And it’s intimate to look at something that is both so clear and confusing because you’re stuck with what you can’t understand. No longer are you allowed to look with an overly-familiar sense of comprehension, to take things in indiscriminately. It can take time – minutes, not seconds – to get over what we think we are seeing and to behold what’s actually there. That interplay between clarity and confusion also appears in Insecticide, a painting whose title and toxic palette suggest the death of an insect. The scene is washed in a muted yellow that gradually migrates into an off-white with a slashed dark green line going through it. At the heart of the insect/insects is a single green point, one that I kept coming back to.

In fact, Cut Wire is full of signalling colours, such as the traffic light red in Factory Floor or the government blue in Petrol. The colours act as a wayfinder, a hatch into the work that excites me. Red. That’s the first layer you see when you look at Factory Floor. It mutates and gets more slippery in the right-hand side with a turquoise blue and a green grey that suggests the shape of something circular, clinical. A coffee cup that’s been deconstructed perhaps. What I wasn’t expecting was a second red. It’s the same red but it’s been applied at a different stage in the painting’s composition. And Barratt chooses to tell us this, details every decision made. It’s all here if you look long enough. You may not recognise the objects, but the making of the painting itself will be open to you.

There’s a rare moment of figuration in Mill: a tiny red machinery of some kind with a brown smudged wheel. Figuration acts as a handrail to the exhibition. It provides a space to focus before getting into the meaty stuff. The window where you would imagine the person operating said machinery is slabbed in two colours: a hopeful eggshell blue and a darker more emotional blue bordering on a dark grey. Mill brings the background to the forefront; in fact, it seems as if these two aspects of perspective aren’t separated but rather stacked on top of each other. The space between the wheel and sky has been squeezed out so that the sky becomes a part of the machine. Every brush stroke is revealed to you. It’s the red in Factory Floor all over again. The demands of painting – tiny slippages between eye and hand – are, to Barratt, a permanent emergency. The exhibition title refers both to the act of cutting wire as well as to the object that cuts wire: cutting, breaking, severing the familial things that exist at a remove defamiliarises our ways of looking, and in turn makes us better lookers. Our perception becomes both the act and the object. The show suggests that abstract figuration is not, or should not, be in the business of deception – illusion even. In fact, it offers quietly, it never was.

By Leo Bussi

Cover image: Amelia Barratt, Trash Chute, 2024. Oil on canvas 25.5 x 30cm. Courtesy of the artist and William Hine, London. Photo credit: Wenxuan Wang.