Charlie Barton’s powerful paintings emanate a resonance, which gives them a life force of their very own. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Barton’s work is concerned with the ‘..origin and transfer of energy...’

With a subject matter ranging from the visceral and corporeal human form, through to the planets and the production of magma, Barton’s work holds a consistent thread. This thread of the rejuvenation, recycling and the transformation of energy, has both physical and spiritual connotations.

Using both form and colour, texture and movement Barton’s paintings possess a luminescent quality, which engage the viewer again and again, encouraging one to look deeper. Sometimes swirling and turbulent, sometimes calm and serene, the works reflect elements of the both human phenomena and of the cosmos, with a natural and unbreakable interdependence.

Gail Haywood

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Barton’s paintings lie somewhere between embryonic birth and star constellations. Her work touches on mortality, rebirth and renewal. The colour harmonies of her stillborn galaxies hint at the ontological and metaphysical.

Working on both the macro and micro scales, from inside a womb to the infinity of space, her galaxies are constantly renewing themselves, like a never ending stream of exploding and imploding big bangs.

From vulva to star nebula, her images are inherently sensual by the very definition of reproduction and rebirth.

Influences of Bacon and Soutine allude to what is under the skin; an internal universe.

These underlying thematic elements continue in her figurative work. Her bodies transient dust clouds, are at once formed and yet undefined, like the ether itself.

Shahriar Mazandi

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Charlie Barton’s paintings are a part of an imaginative present. It’s interesting that on the one hand they couldn’t have been made in an era without sophisticated scientific equipment: the telescope, the camera, perhaps the microscope but at the same time they are not in any way scientific illustrations. Back in the ancient world the moon, like the sun and other planets, was considered divine, and early sci-fi writers like Lucian posited bald homosexual inhabitants.

Not any more. Now images from the Hubble telescope go back to within a billion years of the Big Bang and with expeditions like the Mars Rover, the planets from our own galaxy seem remotely as accessible as images of Baghdad using Google Earth. So Charlie Barton’s paintings properly understood, are landscapes in the expressive tradition. If they find abstraction in natural forms then they are part of a tradition looking back to Monet’s Nympheas. That is a tradition that also includes Jackson Pollock and the American post-war painters and they too certainly seem to have left their mark on Barton’s work. This is the manifest in their material qualities: the feeling for the paint as something independent of the image. Monet’s paint was very free, but something about that extraordinary brushwork isn’t appropriate anymore. The masters, Monet and Bonnard, exhausted that vocabulary. But returning to a form of imaginative figuration with less brushed and more violently 3d approach to oil paints. It’s ironic that she should find the way back to meaningful figuration with the means that were used to get away from it over half a century away. Ironic, but nevertheless sensible. These are the images that astonish a contemporary imagination, they are the topographical wonders that linger in our minds after glimpses of other worlds on the news, they should be painted.

Jack Wakefield