The Thousands

Jackson Pollock famously exclaimed “I don’t paint nature, I am nature”. What he meant is open for interpretation but to my mind this statement encapsulates the way natural processes (movement, gravity, chance, visual instinct) infuse his work and indeed shaped it at least as much as his conscious mind did. Ben Barretto is nature as well, those same processes all exist in his action paintings, but for him it’s nature made in a laboratory: both more tamed and less ferocious than the real thing.

Barretto’s practice of late has seen him building machines out of electrical motors, paint guns, cloth and paint scrapers, which are then used to create large colour field works. During the creation of these works Barretto is cast in the role of robot overseer cum painterly composer, his raw visual instinct always tempered by the unthinking processes of his mechanical creations. In his newest work Wail Songs BB will bring together his painting machines with his chance composition machines to create some bastard synaesthetic hybrid.

(Images courtesy of Ben Barretto).