Barry Hale: Building a bridge between the metaphysical and the postmodern traditions in contemporary art.

by Christopher Dean

Early on in the history of Modernism a line was drawn that separated secular art from spiritual art. In spite of this division a significant number of artists continue to produce work that is associated with spirituality, mysticism and the metaphysical. Since the 1980′s a number of major exhibitions have acknowledged the importance of this tradition in contemporary art. Barry Hale’s work is not unlike the position that is occupied by “alternative” or “complimentary” practices in medicine and science. Central to Hale’s practice is a will considered and well researched visual epistemology. Hale has pieced together an artistic style that combines a sensual immediacy with and abstract reflection. This approach has been systematized by the artist into a comprehensive and syncretic working method. An important feature of Hale’s art practice is that it doesn’t entirely depend upon orthodoxies or hierarchies of the accepted cannon of Western art history. In this way Hale has had the courage to take a truly independent path. However, within Hale’s work there are two tangible connections to mainstream art movements of the twentieth century: the first is Surrealism and the second is Pop Art. Hale’s specific link to Surrealism is through the paintings and drawings of Andre Masson. Masson developed insights into the relationship between myth, the imagination and differences being that Andy Warhol was interested in depicting earthly divinities such as “superstars” while Hale’s subject matter is concerned with the depiction of transcendental divinities such as “gods”. As a result Hale created a new style of art that could be classified as “Afterlife Pop”. From this position it would be fair to suggest that if Andy Warhol is still making art in the afterlife then if would probably resemble Barry Hale’s.

Hale’s other influences are far less traditional for the most part, remain off limits to the conventions and orthodoxies that are to be found with the world of contemporary art. These influences include religious art from China, Tibet, India, medieval European folk, ritualistic art from Mexico and Haiti, south pacific and Melanesian tribal art, as well as Western occult and hermetic traditions from the nineteenth and twentieth century including artists such as Austin Osman Spare. Spare’s influence on Hale is through his series of drawings and paintings known as “atavistic portraits” curiously, the powerful iconography of these traditions has not been widely appropriated by contemporary artists and remains largely a feature of popular culture. What Hale shares with many of the designers of popular culture is an interest in the secret iconography of tarot cards, video games, tattoo designs and pop music graphics. When a contemporary artist appropriates an occult image it is usually for sensational rather that scholarly reasons. Rather that treating these traditions in a superficial way, Hale works from the position of a scholar. A genuine and scholarly commitment to occult traditions is what sets Hale’s work apart from many of his contemporaries.

At present Hale’s work can be divided up into three main areas of investigation. These include paintings, drawings and paper cuts. The most recent paintings on average 1.8 metres in height and 1.3 metres in width and are produced using thin layers of brightly coloured acrylic on stretch canvases. The imagery contained in within these paintings includes depictions of a wide selection of mythical divinities, demons and angels. These images have been selected form the artist’s detailed knowledge of occult lore. The architecture of these paintings form a symmetrical composition that is offset by an infinite variety of asymmetrical details. At the centre of these works is a prominent circle wheel that acts as both a metaphor for the cycles of time and changes, and as a formal device from which the disintegrating and collapsing narratives of the paintings are fixed. The exuberance, intensity and abundance contained within these paintings generates a picture plane that provides the viewer with an enhanced or supersensory field of clear vision.
In contrast to the paintings the drawings have a completely different feel. Instead, being constructed as a self-contained Ideological system, they reveal traces of an intimate and fleeting experience. These works capture the momentary and the contingent and their technique resembles what the Surrealist called “automatic drawings”. The imagery of these drawings reflect the shape or a form trapped within a thin column of smoke, or an anthropomorphic figure captured in a cloud, or a silhouette caught for a split second in a cowboy’s lariat. Hale produces many of these small drawings in a relatively short period of time and refers to them as “peripheral specters” of “scribblings in ectoplasm.” These works reveal the musings of a private world and depict the fantasy and eroticism of a daydream that every now and again has the potential to become a nightmare. The third component of Hale’s art practise are the paper cuts. These works are cut out of thin black cardboard and usually depict a single figure or a demon or an angel.
The paper cuts portray Hale’s cosmology at its most pure because the figures that have been cut out of the cardboard exist only in negative space. In these works the void becomes substance. Through his comprehensive working method Hale has been able to bring together all of these apparently disparent techniques of art making to a well-developed and well-considered visual system that has the power to communicate the experience of a revelation. With the used of a comprehensive and syncretic working method. Hale has produced an extensive body of “iconoclastic icons” that bridge the gap between the metaphysical, the alternative and the postmodern traditions of contemporary art.

Barry Hale: Building a bridge between the metaphysical and the postmodern traditions in contemporary art.

Fulgur