Hypervisible (Invisible)
There’s something magnetic to Leslie Barlow’s figures: lush, painterly, with a luminescence that literally bleeds through from the ground of the work to the surface, her paintings are populated with people who are vibrant, vital, and charismatic. But for all the definitive presence the figures within Barlow’s painting may wield, the environments that they inhabit are far more enigmatic. Collage deckles in and out of the background, shards of space fall out of bodies, features and sometimes even entire faces fall blank in lieu for the honeyed wood surface to bleed through. Barlow’s paintings are more subtle creatures than you would imagine from the bold palettes that build the framework of her chromatic vocabulary, a complex library of symbols and motifs building from one image to the next. Barlow’s work navigates a liminal existence between the figural and the abstract, between two identities that would hold ground in contemporary painting: in short, an aesthetic metaphor for her lived experience as a biracial woman. The art historical canon is oft to look over the brown body in its surveys; Kerry James Marshall is quoted as saying, “I committed myself to only making black figures in my paintings because there are not enough paintings in museums, anywhere really, that have black figures as the central subject of these paintings.” The representation of the multicultural condition at present, Barlow has found, is so surface and infantile that it betrays a gap in theory and
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