John Barker Artist

Santa Fe artist John Barker
paints energetically and prophetically. He is a decidedly 21st century artist, a fervent creator of images that possess a singularly accessible humanity-and as such his works are rife with neuroses and noise. His paintings are like visual manifestations of a tenaciously busy mind: perfervid worlds where the vibrant, even volatile, always trumps the world 'Distractionism' to describe his work, and indeed his compositions sometimes seem spacey or preoccupied. The term is both an affectionate refutation and an earnest exoneration of our distinctly contemporary, dwindling attention spans-a serious and goofy send-up to the artist's multi-faceted, multi-tasking life. It's perhaps paradoxical, then, that Barker's buzzing, electric portraits require such keen attention.

His works are cunning and adult, but often rendered with the gestural urgency of a young child. They teeter deliciously on the tightrope of figuration and abstraction, where a coherent narrative is

marcelously elusive. Barker's characters can seem like marginal ones: misfits with disproportionated and jarringly intense features, whose limbs and curves are made many times over by frenetic markings. Though Barker most often paints people he knows, the figures have universally recognizable attributes, and an implicit vulnerability that's instantly relatable and endering. In this way, Barker brilliantly merges individual depictions with the traits that make us all so inexorably and complexly human, and meanwhile achieves that often stated but rarely realized artistic objective, what Leo Steinberg called "fixating thought in aesthetic form, pinning down ethereal conceptions ... in vital designs."

Barker focuses his energies on that which is quintessentially here and now, and accordingly, his portraits feel fantastically alive. His subjects are in turns focused and frazzled: tricksters that crackle and hum with irrefutably human personalities. Cords of paint twist and overlap in imitation of speech or thought, like phantoms of future or past ideas made visible. These dashed markings appear as sparks and halos; protean elements that hover and dance around Barker's figures. This lends them a peculiar shape-shifting quality that takes place before the viewer's very eyes and perhaps helps to explain why so many of the artist's portraits rebuke any attempt at classification. They exist decidedly apart from explanation, a potentially disorienting sort of anti-thesis that in fact offers multitudinous interpretive possibilities. In a moment, a painting's thrust can shift from figurative to densley abstracted, modified with text and photos that riff and jive with the figures, affording us unfettered access to them, and ultimately, to the artist himself. John Barker makes paintings that are indicative of a wondering, wandering mind, yet they exude an illuminated clarity specific to the intimate poetry of personal experience. They are deeply felt visual expressions that acknowledge an informed acceptance of modern reality's irrational, constantly shifting focus. - Iris McLister