Space in Flatland
Matthew Bourbon
The recently deceased Scott Barber is being honored with a handsome survey exhibition at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas. The show reveals an artist refining his art into a body of very accomplished paintings. As a fixture of the Texas art scene, Barber’s art is often contextualized by descriptions of pictorial flatness and an overt mimicry of digital luminescence. This type of analysis is understandable, especially given the technology Barber used to create his art. He was known to use high-powered microscopes and various computer programs to find and manipulate imagery. With his urethane on aluminum paintings that date from 2000 to 2005, one can hardly deny his obvious desire to capture a sleek unmodulated look similar to electronic visualizations. For some the flat mechanical aspect of his paintings is the lynch pin for us to understand the import of his project. I think the exact opposite is true. There is much more to Barber’s painting then a pristine and lustrous surface–there is space in flatland.
Of course we can’t undervalue Barber’s penchant for digital renderings. Still, the fact that artists, like Barber, use electronic mechanisms to make their art is not unusual. The fact that some artists create work that adopts the distinctive look of computer imagery also seems fairly prosaic. Gone are the days when one stood awed by the abundance of information that is transmitted through technology. Pictorial visualizations of digital content are so commonplace in our daily lives, that we have become numb to their existence. Our recognition of the computers’ role in how we see and interpret the world has receded to the background of our concerns; we live in Oz, nearly oblivious or at least disinterested with the Wizard pulling strings from behind a vast digital curtain. For an expanding computer literate public, the digital landscape simply exists as fact. Its presence in our life is taken for granted even as access to its luxuries is bound by economics. The utter commonness of our digital lifestyle becomes more obvious with each proceeding generation. Cell phones and I-pods are nearly grafted to the bodies of the young as if they were merely another useful appendage. While we are not living in some science fiction dystopia of artificial intelligence gone awry, we are living in a culture of digital ubiquity. Thus, making paintings that adopt a digitized visual language is almost like looking out one’s window and painting a landscape–it’s simply representing what we see and know.
That said, with regard to Barber’s art, the fact that he uses technology to make his paintings is noteworthy, but tangential to where the real power of his work resides. Ironically for paintings that foreground fractured bits of flat color and radiating pulses of intensely reflective paint, the substantive force in the work is the development of objects in space. Barber’s imagery develops a world of amorphous slices of pigment stacked upon each other to create a sophisticated structure akin to the searching geometries of the grand man of painting–Cezanne. I don’t invoke Cezanne’s name to legitimize Barber’s art. Instead, I see a close relationship between the way Barber uses a pixilated world of shapes to build spatial relationships, and the manner in which Cezanne represented his world from swatches of interlaced markings. This desire for perceptual depth found through veils of flatness is not to deny the efficacy of the monochrome fragments of paint that Barber manipulates. The fact that Barber’s work is simultaneously flat and recessional is a large part of its success. It is precisely in the interaction between these two polarities that the paintings take life. Interestingly, the dance between flatness and space may, on the face of it, seem very one-sided. With a shallow observation one might easily come away from Barber’s art with the impression that the paintings are weighted much more toward the notion of abstract flatness. Upon closer examination, however, it becomes abundantly clear that the development of spatial relationships and objecthood within the paintings is paramount. The accretion of almost collaged fragments of paint is the means by which Barber represents the world to us. Whether it is the stalk and bud of a flower or a scene from anime, he is always picturing the world. The convergence of Barber’s method and subject, however, is perhaps most emphatically felt in the last two years of his career, where he employs his puzzle arranged paintings to decipher the cancerous cells within his own body.
In looking at these last paintings, one is immediately struck by how easily one is trapped in a game of recognition–trying to understand the intricate layering of flat color upon flat color. Without reading unwarranted psychological associations into the art, one can’t help but notice an increasing potency in Barber’s later works. These paintings are clearly Barber’s most ambitious and complex undertaking. Seen from a distance the paintings feel fuzzy, as if our eyes are blurring the forms out of focus. As one moves closer to the paintings the colorful forms snap into place building a dramatically interdependent structure, as one element connects to another. This visual flip-flop between description and dissolution is masterfully executed by the artist. By carefully examining the cellular forms within the paintings one can follow a deliberate stepping movement back into pictorial space. This slow unfolding of pictorial illusionism creates a dynamic field of ovoid shapes that are as precise as they are indistinct. The play between the corporeal and the ethereal is startling. I can’t help but think of the theological associations of something being firmly grounded in its own body and yet simultaneously formless and empty. There is something ontological about this work, and not only because the infected and mutated cells depicted within the paintings are those of Barber’s own body. Interestingly Barber began using cellular imagery prior to his diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. But it is his decision to continue with the depiction of his own biology that led to the strongest work of his career.
These late paintings are rich and rewarding. There is a searching quality that enables the imagery to appear as if in flux. As the breadth of this survey exhibition attests, Barber made a varied body of work. The period toward the end of his life, however, is the most mysterious. It elicits the most questions. Whether this is due to the personal connection these works have with the artist’s disease–I do not know. What I do know, is that Barber created his best, most powerfully realized, art in the last couple years of his too short life.
