A puzzling sense of space and strange shifting landscape is a fundamental element within my work. Although the relationship to nature is a very important part of my work, the drawings and paintings are not reflections upon an idyll, but rather explore the tensions of a familiar landscape bisected by human interventions…
Raphael BarrattArtist Website
Revivalism has marked aesthetic culture for generations – the burst of Neo-Classical architecture in the 15th and 19th centuries, the resurgence of fashion trends such as stays, corsets, and chain mail, and now, also a blooming Renaissance revival amongst traditional painters. Raphael Barratt, born and working in Kent, operates in a similar vein, drawing from the Early Renaissance in her fresco-esque paintings, but also expanding the historic style with a post-humanist perspective and global inspirations.
With thin washes and layers of colour, Barratt creates dreamlike worlds, where figures and nature are suspended in a single moment of transition, even in the multi-panel paintings inspired by the narrative stretching frescos of Italy. Caught in this state of flux, her paintings have a palpable sense of realness and intensity. Appealing to Early Renaissance painter Giotto, whose paintings captured the realities of the human form, Barratt’s figures have the same sense of being ‘real’: captured in their momentary emotions, vulnerabilities, and movements.
Giotto. St. Francis Mourned by St. Clare, held by Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, Assisi, Italy.
The painters of the Early Renaissance had a great concern for the depth of humans – both visually and spiritually. Primarily leaning on Humanist philosophies and frameworks (which exalted the classical period and centred the human figure by focusing on the unlimited potential of mankind), the subject matter of the Renaissance broadened from the biblical, and expanded to cover mythologies, historical figures of the Classical period, and even the everyday man. In trying to embrace this feeling of ‘realness’ and authenticity of mankind, painters gradually moved away from the extreme flatness of the Gothic and iconographic Byzantine styles, and instead explored depth, perspective, lighting, and anatomical accuracy.
Piero della Francesca. The Nativity (1470-75), held by The National Gallery.
These visual characteristics find themselves in Barratt’s work, particularly influenced by Giotto and Piero della Francesca, for their realistic figuration, play with perspective, and emotional connectivity, rolling hills and geometricism, respectively. However, Barratt’s paintings are not just modern recreations of the historical masters, she builds on these stylistic factors while exploring the connectivity of man and the landscape, decentering the human as subject.
Reimagining Renaissance aesthetics in a post-humanist visual framework — in which humans are not the central subject of discussion, representation, or discourse, but instead seen as a small part of a larger web of connectivity — Barratt recenters the organic forms and “rocky hills and deep valleys surrounding the Iron Age hill fort and fruit farm” she grew up surrounded by in Kent. However, her paintings are not traditional landscapes paintings either, instead focusing on this tension between the deemphasized figure and the natural landscape, between man’s interventions in the land and the memories of untouched nature. Echoing the forms of the landscape, complementing the colour of the hills, or even absent yet still palpable in the scene, Barratt’s figures become a means to explore the emotion and atmosphere of these imagined topographies.
Inspired by Indian miniature paintings, the artist makes reference to these intricate small scale works in her large-scale paintings. Barratt draws on Indian miniature paintings’ tendencies for expansive natural settings, feelings of depth in a two-dimensional plane, and expressive ‘transparency’ in the building of forms and figures to grant her works a transcendental quality built through emotional connection with viewers.
While Early Renaissance painting was defined by Humanist philosophy and historic European aesthetic culture, Barratt’s paintings work to renegotiate the movement’s visual characteristics and the contemporary climate. Transforming the human figure – the iconographic subjects of Renaissance Paintings – into spectral beings, Barratt adopts a post-humanist approach to painting, blurring the lines between the abstract, the landscape, and the figurative genres. In doing so, she highlights the atmosphere as her subject, constructed through luminescence balanced against deep colours, ambiguity balanced against memory, and the human figure balanced against absence.
(By Teddy Woods)