Artist: Kyle Barnes

Kyle Barnes presents a series of paintings of large-scale, monumental, realistically- rendered female heads. Disembodied and isolated against flat colour-field backgrounds, each is depicted with a thorough coating of viscous liquid that describes the material consequence of a sudden immersion or surprising inundation. These rather startling images stimulate all kinds of speculation: Are we witnessing a birth trauma, as the subject's features are occluded and emerge through an amniotic medium? Is this some kind of elemental transformation in progress?

The paintings are observational and forensically particular. The artist’s technique records a rigorously perceived actuality that allows for no abstraction or ambiguity. As a result, we are confronted with an image of certainty, a report of a definite physical state which is corporeal and insistent on our acceptance of the fact. So, what are we to make of this woman and her situation?

The aforementioned immersion and inundation are processes familiar to many cultural and anthropological practices. Liquid mediums of all kinds are ubiquitous as vehicles for transformation – to mark and ease the path from one state to another. Holy water, oil, blood, the serums of humans, plants and animals are all used to anoint the initiate, the supplicant and the elect. The artist’s model appears to undergo such a journey, although we are not know its particular nature.

Of course, the act of painting has a direct relationship to such processes. Oil paint is analogous to the liquidity of an anointing substance. It is a transformative process - the conjuring of images, symbols and significant markings derive from the physical manipulation of the fluid medium. In the painting of the woman we see an idea of her brought into being, the coating of her with a numinous liquid describes the magical process itself, as we see with Botticelli’s Venus born from the elemental sea.