John Bartley

7 Sonia Legge, 2019 hard-won in moments of personal darkness and enlightenment. They are dark and passionate: they are dark beautiful. I suggest passion because these paintings are, well, steamy. Even those painted in cooler tones seem humid, languid. But Bartley’s slow-reveal sensuousness is tempered by restraint: look closely, the paint on the canvas is really very thin, holding the contradiction of sheer smoothness, long depths of field and a nearly tactile but fast evaporating beauty. The darkness in these paintings more than hints at intimacy. There is a darkness to intimacy, even just to the idea of intimacy: when we are intimate we are up close, enclosed, private. In these paintings there is something of the intimacy and ardour we hear in certain voices: I’m thinking of Maria Callas and Nick Cave. They share with John Bartley a dark romance of the heart and a suggestion of the flesh yearning along with the heart for meaning. We turn to art for visual pleasure, but also for clues as to how we might navigate this lived experience, accepting darkness at the same time as maintaining a connection with passion. This is because art opens up the space for us to discuss and consider very personal, meaningful things. Watching reality all the time is not necessarily a good way of seeing life clearly.