Barry Camps
LandE scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW language, suspending the viewers between imagination and reality marks out a considerable part of your production. How would you define the relationship between abstraction and representation in your practice? In particular, how does reality and a tendency towards abstraction find their balance in your work? And how do you view the concepts of the real and the imagined playing out within your works?
Philip K. Dick said“ that it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind”. I ought to know, I do the same thing in a way. The creating process becomes a painting. The painting is real as long as you are absolute honest during the whole process.. I filter all the images and feelings I see and get every day from inspiration sources like movies, television, social media, discussions with fellow artists, history, the news and put them on the canvas layer by layer. It tells something about the way I see the world. Or at least my world, my life and how I react on it through my paintings.
Inviting the viewer to discover interpretations and associations, your works allow an open reading, a great multiplicity of meanings: associative possibilities seems to play a crucial role in your pieces.
How important is this degree of openness?
Very. A painting isn’ t finished before someone has seen it. Without the viewer it doesn’ t exist, it has no meaning. The viewer completes the painting through his our her thoughts. My world enters the viewers world and together it becomes a new one. It’ s the viewer who makes the painting, not just me. There are as many paintings as there are viewers. After making a painting I try to look at it as a viewer and create world number one and I hope a lot of new worlds will follow.
Your works have on the surface a seductive beauty: at the same time they challenge the viewers ' perceptual parameters suggesting the unseen, establishing a channel of communication between the conscious level and the subconscious sphere: artists are always interested in probing to see what is beneath the surface: maybe one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what ' s your view about this? In particular, do you think that your works could induce a process of self-reflection in the viewers?
Like I said, the viewer completes the artwork. As an artist you try to make
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