Alice Barker

See Investable Artists 2023

Looking at a wash of pink paint as if through a filmy screen, we make out a trio of figures – or perhaps three iterations of the same person: we’re on memory’s terrain in Alice Barker’s work. Here in ‘Pink Skies’ there is a sense of vastness, yet it is intimate, and this is one uncanny aspect infusing the works. ‘The Three Lonely Travellers’ emphasises solitude and multiplicity as essential to the characters. This connects to how the artist describes drawing on memory as a subject: wandering through its maze, encountering vistas and deadends. The undeniable radiance of the colours here is complicated by the transparency of their application: even as they emerge, they are fading away. The flattened perspective of the children in the foreground of ‘Were We Ever Really Here?’ is superimposed on a landscape stretching behind them, connected and disconnected. They are children as they experience themselves when in command of their fantastical inner world. The background evokes the shore, that liminal zone, symbolic as a fluid boundary between realms. In ‘Max and Me’ the image is on the cusp of dissolving: photographic as a snapshot in mid-air, but eminently painterly in its intense use of swirling brushwork and forms – reminiscent of Lucien Freud’s promethean use of paint in his portraits, or the affect of lucid flux in Francis Bacon’s. And how are we to interpret the area of black paint in the bottom right-hand corner? Almost wave-like, is it forgetting about to overcome the remembered scene, whose red colours surge even more brightly in contrast to the dark?