Synaesthesia
ZERO is pleased to announce Synaesthesia, an exhibition of new work by Mark Barrow.
For his first solo presentation at the gallery Barrow offers a group of work that continues his collaboration with Sarah Parke in which she designs hand-woven fabrics for his paintings. Tracing the sequence of colored threads in her fabric, Barrow maps the entire surface with dots of paint wherever weft crosses warp. He culls colors from the fabric to create his compositions, leaving some threads unpainted to show through the surface and optically mix with the painted dots. While these compositions are largely intuitive, they are, nonetheless, inextricable from the fabric beneath. Barrow's hand moves with the unevenly stretched ground, the constellation of marks an indication of both the fabric's swaying structure and its numeric logic.
In a traditional textile a series of repeating numbers, corresponding to the shafts and pedals of a loom, serves as the template for creating a pattern. Typically when woven in two colors (a dark one and a light one) the pattern is clearly visible. In the fabrics for Synaesthesia, Parke assigns a different color thread to each number, masking the patterns in a matrix of vibrant hues. The colors in each fabric then are less in service of a pattern and more a denotation of space and time. This idea is furthered when Parke uses sequences of random numbers to create fabrics that have no pattern at all.
The paintings are ultimately titled with three letters corresponding to the thread colors Barrow uses to start his compositions, each thread having been assigned a random letter before the fabrics were made.
In a way, Barrow's work is existential, less in the philosophical sense and more in the way that perception is linked to our conceptual system. As the linguists Lakoff and Johnson's research suggests, our interaction with the physical world (perception) is the foundation for how we understand any concept. Synaesthesia marks Barrow's interest in this perceptual/conceptual framework. His paintings embrace ideas long associated with abstraction and filter them through an almost scientific, empirical methodology. Working on a seemingly molecular level Barrow builds new pathways across different sensory, cognitive and ideological systems, subtly shifting the viewer's experience.
Barrow takes the show's title, Synaesthesia from a neurological condition with which an individual involuntarily conflates multiple cognitive or sensory experiences from one stimulus. For example, in a common form of synaesthesia, grapheme to color synaesthesia, an individual perceives letters or numbers as colored. As such, the condition proves an apt metaphor for Barrow and Parke's process. Each painting, a densely layered abstraction with an underlying logic, moves across mediums: from numbers to textile to paint to letters.