Paul Barlow: 00:00:00

South Parade, 24 March - 30 April 2022

Paul Barlow shows five paintings made, I think, by pouring water over acrylic, pushing it around a bit and letting it dry. This produces wave forms and intricate tendrils like the fronds of some delicate form of seaweed. Sounds simple.

That's why they're interesting. The paintings are the product of an impersonal process, guided by the firm hand of the artist. They produce a visual terrain balanced between incident and expanse, continually revealing more as the eye roams over them, while remaining uncluttered.

There is courage in Barlow's restraint, which imparts confidence to the works. As with a person, confidence can be captivating: they have an air of calm, their habitual understatement makes their every action seem deliberate and important. Faced with such a person, or such a painting, one's own frenetic energy seems daft, even plain undignified.

The paintings are arranged to suggest a kind of wave or pulse circulating through the tiny gallery, entering different phases as it passes through the colours, patterns and tonalities, as if they are all part of the same whole. Not that they're windows onto something external. They play with scale: from each tiny fractal frond to the exhibition as a whole, the work resembles itself; you could zoom in and zoom out infinitely.

The effect produced is one of quiet grandeur. A kind of classicism, but one based less on the human past than on the forms of nature, which is how what we now call classical art was invented in the first place. This is painting at its source. And they have great titles like dumdumdumdummydoowah.