Artist: Stephen Appleby-Barr

Robilant+Voena presents an exhibition of paintings by Stephen Appleby-Barr in London. This is the Canadian-born artist’s first exhibition with Robilant+Voena since 2022, presenting a new body of work that has taken him two years to create. Together, the paintings offer a glimpse into a realm of wondrous yet familiar visions, combining Appleby-Barr’s immense technical mastery with dreamlike imaginings disconnected from time or place. The exhibition presents the artist’s Mesocosmos, a self-contained universe that sits in the interstitial space between the macro and the micro, between before and after, between fiction and non-fiction, a shifting sphere shaped by an innately personal relationship with the world.

The twenty paintings in the exhibition have an almost spectral quality, resolute visual evocations giving way to hazy recollections. The world of Appleby-Barr’s paintings is peopled by familiar yet fantastical figures, whose interactions are ambiguous and compelling, allowing the viewer to find their own narrative path through the artist’s Mesocosmos. The three largest pieces in the exhibition, each measuring 180 x 150 cm, depict architectural forms in a glorious state of ruination and renewal, with exuberant floral blooms bursting through the remnants of the building. Silhouetted against the dreamlike scenes are curious groupings of figures – behatted humans, nymphs and skeletons – whose relationships to the scene and to each other are intentionally left undefined by the artist.

Nine smaller pieces in the exhibition and three medium works, including Smoker and Fool, appear like portraits or studies of the ethereal figures, highlighting the artist’s technical skill and deep contemplation of their attitudes. At other points in the exhibition, these and other characters reappear in anecdotal scenes, seen gambling in Bet Your Teeth, or at a mystic burial ritual in Put it in the ground.

While undoubtedly contemporary – the artist punctuates his paintings with wry humour, the occasional incongruous cigarette dropping from a figure’s lips – the works have a timeless essence, reminiscent of Old Masters whom Appleby-Barr admires. His chiaroscuro head studies evoke Baroque figure painting, while the towering flowers of the larger works take inspiration from Dutch still lifes. Appleby-Barr’s paintings seem to defy chronology, as if belonging to a futuristic past, or an archaic future, an intangible place between now and then. This anachronistic impression is heightened by Appleby-Barr’s palette; evading visual hyperbole, over the last few years the artist has tended towards grisaille, restricting his tonal range, using only black, white, along with some yellows and reds. With these few colours, the paintings offer rich and suggestive encounters with Appleby-Barr’s world, a testament to the technical aptitude of their creator.

In Appleby-Barr’s experience, painting, sculpting and drawing (which the artist shortens to ‘PSD’) are how he navigates the world around him. In this way, making art is not a choice for the artist, it is a necessity. In his words:

‘My disposition towards painting, sculpture and drawing is amorous. I feel it deeply and have devoted my life to finding out what it’s about. Not what it’s about conceptually, but what it’s about sensationally. On the subject of art I have no formal education to speak of. It’s all been a tumble. Making, looking and feeling are how I’ve found my way through it.’

The artist’s process is essentially three-fold; as ideas for figures and compositions emerge, he fills sketchbooks with notes and visual meanderings, giving life in miniature to his organic creativity. Following this, he creates sculptures – figures, busts, flowers, and detailed architectural models – from clay, plaster and found objects. These sculptures have a dual identity as standalone works of art, and as the three-dimensional visualisations on which he bases his paintings. Finally, the artist turns to his canvas, working gradually on several paintings at once. For this exhibition, the artist rejected conventional brushes, instead creating bespoke felt swabs rolled into a tampon-like form, which he used to apply the paint, in an action more akin to drawing than painting. This rougher, more direct manner of transferring the paint to the canvas instilled the works with a dreamlike quality, bestowing a captivating sense of possibility.

This is one of the defining features of the series as a whole; in contrast to earlier paintings from his career, which were almost photorealist in their detail, the paintings in Mesocomos provoke more questions than they give answers. The paintings are poetic not prescriptive, fluid not fixed. There is a deliberate ambiguity in his works, with the artist giving us space to explore the paintings through our own perspectives.

In his fantastical depictions of figures and wondrous places, Appleby-Barr opens a door to the inconclusiveness of selfhood. He encourages us to see richness in the everyday, to listen to our dreams, and consider the constant unknowable forces that shape us, and how we in turn create forces that shape the world surrounding us. The message of Appleby-Barr’s ethereal and resonant Mesocosmos shines through the grisaille of his paintings: ‘If a painting must end then let it contain enough openings that one might continue through it.’