Fundamental to Barber’s approach across a broad spectrum of subjects or situations is his use of found images, generally in black and white, which he has edited and reconfigured through the mechanisms of painting. These derive from unfamiliar and private sources, for instance old photograph albums, and so resonate already with some sense of memory relating to place, people or occurrences. On to this imagery Barber has grafted a further set of meanings (or ambivalences) in the process of translating them into paintings: rather as in a Rorschach test, the original images have provided a springboard for his well-considered painting agenda.

As Barber has found his inspiration in black and white, this has left him free to introduce the dimension of colour in several different ways. Often the colours chosen have an enhanced, theatrical quality, as if belonging to a dream, the clarity of which is fading even as we register it. Sometimes there are swatches of separate colours attached like a chart to one side of the composition, suggesting a palette prepared for this particular painting or even some kind of incursion into its original form (as in Before a journey). Some compositions appear unfinished, which leave the viewer with an impression of uncertainty. Do we know what will happen next? Can we be sure, indeed, about what we see now? In Beneath the canopy, what is it that has caught the attention of the two women in this leafy scene? What do the ringing bells mean for the loden-clad figure in Chimes? Other compositions convey a sense of mystery or frustration, as if the viewer has been left to wrestle with numerous options of his own devising.

Such uncertainties and hints (some of them no doubt red herrings) which underscore Craig Barber’s paintings and give them their distinctive dynamic are reinforced by recurrent references to climbing or the overcoming of barriers – steep hillsides, castle slopes, rocky bluffs, with bridges to cross over new barriers and challenges, all potent images from the realm of dreams.  On such imagery, giving shape to what may be everyday emotions or occurrences, Barber builds his enigmatic compositions. Transience and transcendence, private and collective memory, teased into focus through images that seem familiar and yet curiously foreign to us, bring a sense of disquiet but also an intimation of serenity and resolution.

Biography

Craig Barber was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1981 and educated at Winchester School of Art, graduating with distinction in 2004. In 2000 he was awarded the Louise Clear Memorial Prize and while still a student was shortlisted for John Moores Painting Prize in 2004. Since holding his first one-person exhibition in 2006 at the Fairfield Arts Centre, Basingstoke, Barber has participated in nine group exhibitions, two of them in Switzerland, in Sierre and Bern. Since 2002 he has taught and held workshops in Stourbridge, Winchester and Coventry. He has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 2005, participating in 2006 in the Gallery’s theme exhibition Everyone Sang: a view of Siegfried Sassoon and his world by twenty-five painters today and in 2008 in РОДИНА: twenty-five artists from the West winter in Russia. First one-person exhibition with Francis Kyle Gallery 2009.