Windows
TOM BARNETT
As winter turned to spring a year ago Tom Barnett cleared his head. He made paintings using only white and silver paint and pastels. Some of these pictures were sparse - a few lines and symbols marked on a bare surface – and others were heavy - dense patches and sections of colour laid over each other like geo- graphical diagrams. During this time he also discovered slate, and found a new surface on which to paint. Each of the first slate paintings showed traces (a smear, a scratch, a spray) of the artist’s presence. In the new paintings – triptychs of slate painted and sprayed with neon colours, the surfaces scratched with a knife – he has not gone; he is still there.
In this exhibition the small physical certainties and ten- tative emotional expression of the earlier work has been amplified.Tom Barnett has created his repertoire, not of images, nor symbols, nor themes, but of materi- als. Increasingly able to use these to his own ends, he is acquainting their particular qualities with the personal feelings and passing thoughts and emotions he seeks to express. In this way, he moves towards an art that is in- tensely private but equally universal. Here we see an artist taking some happy, determined steps towards the personal language that he needs to continue, and ad- vance, this vital, important communication.
