My Baby Skeletons

Exhibition text by Koshik Zaman, C-print

As I’m typing, I’m glancing outside towards the dull, shifty July summer sky in Stockholm, and my mind waltzes off to a terrace in Italy of last year or a meadow in the South of France that will live rent free until it’s replaced by another. I struggle to suspend these whims of setting course towards elsewhere. You are always like this in summer time, my partner tells me, when I suggest booking a last-minute trip somewhere, anywhere. It’s meant as a dig, surely, but it is what it is.

Johan Barrett’s visual brand of lush, inviting landscapes and flower pots gel very well with my this not so elusive archive of images that imprints my current mood. While our first meeting dates back several years in time, the first time I encountered his work was at a recent edition of the annual Vårsalongen at Liljevalchs. The vases alluding to Matisse was a personal standout in what at the time was a pretty same-ole’ show. What strikes me with Johan Barrett’s work is the blend of raw simplicity. Oftentimes resting on contours and shapes, his paintings are vividly evocative; like a tidbit or window to complete or continue a larger scene that has begun orchestrating at his command.

Following his show “Dark Holes of Light” earlier this year which brought forth lustrous palettes, the new show at Riche Fenix, aptly titled “My Baby Skeletons”, presents a selection of works including works on paper that were originally intended merely as sketches. Some rest as works in their own right, while others have served as points of reference for larger works. For the making, Johan Barrett has employed cheap materials and mundane objects that have been found readily at hand; ink pens, printer paper and his children’s old markers. Another evident focal element to the artist’s practice is wanderlust, circling back to what will soon be a boiling point for me, if some permanence in solar disposition won’t soon be detected around where I am. Johan Barrett’s works map a merger between photographs from past travels merge, saved images of dreamy destinations and such fleeting amorphous memories that come back to poke us when we least can resist.

Life might not always, in the very instant, be happening right where we are, or so we might be too prone to feel at the wake of another summer day’s letdown, but you know; Life, if you leave here, to live somewhere else, can I come too?

Riche Fenix, August 20 – September 29, 2024