The paintings in Cut Wire reveal the performative interplay between artist, material and surface. Each composition, abstract and often intimately scaled, reveals the resolution of a tension negotiated in the act of painting. Working from her own everyday snapshots, Barratt’s paintings methodically translate a place or object in the world at large into a more cryptic assemblage of painterly marks. As the camera squeezes reality down into a palm-sized view, the painted image reverses some essential feature of the artist’s photographic recordings back out into the world through slow observation and speculation. Each image, perhaps a mundane or overlooked detail or clutter of objects discovered on the artist’s walks through Glasgow, is chosen for its potential to be distilled, disrupted or reinterpreted through paint. Fragments of a weathered surface, working scrapyards, abandoned vehicles, empty construction sites, brickwork scaled by a pattern of weeds or discarded electrical goods are documented by the artist, becoming territories to reevaluate back in the studio.

Beginning each composition by working with the canvas flat, the traces of the image are drawn in paint; suggestions in inky outlines to provide a framework. Decisions for the colour palette are often made at the outset, with Barratt favouring connotative hues ingrained in the collective psyche; blues and greens that recall institutional environments or reds, yellows and earthen tones that speak to road signs, machinery or alarms. The first act is in observing the reaction between the source image and the primary marks on the surface, elucidating through an initial blueprint of line and gesture, the starting point for the painting to take over.

What follows is an intensive paring down, pulling out potential in forms and atmospheres, departing from the source. Lines give way to sweeping washes of colour and more tense daubs of pigment, variously harmonious and discordant. Broad planes intersect with overlaid bursts of brushwork to delineate distinct zones or thresholds. Shapes spill in and over one another, in competition for space, until everything is where it should be, hanging in the balance. What is left at the end of the act of painting are the various compressions of time and labour between artist and surface, built up through repeated visits. The journey may start quickly but ends slowly in a process almost akin to painting a still life; embarking with the immediacy of drawing to plot out the edges of a subject before returning to flesh out a deeper psychological presence.

Press

Signalling Colour: Amelia Barratt ‘Cut Wire’ reviewed by Leo Bussi | Plinth

"Associative Tumbles and Imaginative Leaps": Amelia Barratt in conversation with Clemens Müller | Kennich