Towards a Brighter Future:
Art Works by a Self Confessed Utopian
As a teenager growing up in the 1970’s, Richard Bartle used to sit in the holes he and his best friend had dug on local derelict land and wait for ‘The Bomb’. Brought up on a diet of anarchist punk bands such as Crass, and apocalyptic movies like Threads, Bartle’s latest works are a haunting reflection of that experience and an awareness of the inevitability and effects of such disasters, man-made or natural.
In his recent works, Bartle uses the process of photomontage and a code-like composition to construct what seem to be prophetic or historic insights into sociopolitical and natural events. His work is a reflection on the contradictions that exists in modern society - like the manner by which humans live at the foot of active volcanoes or a society who bases its economy on arms production.
Bartle uses the mass media images that form part of our every day experience, sampling and transferring these into cellular panels, clustering them together to form savage new images, ‘visual tumors’. Presented like sliding panel puzzles, they have a sense of transience - also mirrored in the textured, almost nostalgic surfaces that are created by the actual transferring process. Compositions that appear fixated upon one particular event become ephemeral - displaying the potential to be shifted or rearranged both physically and in the imagination. That which is depicted, though seemingly static, is therefore in a constant state of flux and appears at times beyond history or any given moment.
Bartle’s work at once feels like a premonitory dream and an historical document. Despite its often anger inducing and saddening subject matter, the work paradoxically offers a sense of pleasure and visual harmony. Through its manifestation the artist succeeds in creating order out chaos, as well as reconciling the bridge between a utopian and dystopian world - a balance is created in all our worlds.
Lesley Guy
Artist / Writer
September 2005