The search for ideal feminine beauty remains the driving force behind the painting practice of Andrew Barns-Graham, whose new show, Venus, takes Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus as a starting point for his own investigation of contemporary notions of beauty and glamour.
Barns-Graham’s various iterations of Venus are depicted standing in water whilst dressed in timeless and glamorous gowns. They inhabit extraordinary, idealised landscapes which seem to be influenced by the New Zealand environment. In this way, the artist juxtaposes three different conceptions of beauty: the natural beauty of the landscape, the glamour of the dresses and the innate beauty of the women themselves. In each, there is a sense of timelessness, but this is an illusion; all beauty is fleeting. This seems to be evoked in the works themselves, in which the models appear to be sinking into the water, rather than floating above it as Botticelli’s goddess did. In this way, Barns-Graham calls attention to the precarious and elusive nature of beauty.
Barns-Graham’s technique places an emphasis on superficiality—of the characters and landscapes depicted as well as the painted surface. His highly-refined technique allows him to create the smooth surfaces and perfectly even colours that give his paintings an unsettlingly faultless finish. Detail is pared down to a minimum, focusing attention on the women, who are themselves anonymous, archetypal figures, standing in as potential contemporary models of the Goddess Venus.
The perfection of the subject in Barns-Graham’s paintings is attained through the obliteration of identifying marks and features, creating a uniformity of surface that is distinctly unreal. When all idiosyncratic marks and details are erased, and colour and form are remodelled to reflect nothing short of perfection, the result is a disconcerting empathetic distance which lends a fantastical dream-like quality to the works; they are familiar, yet troubling.
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