Eleanor Bartlett - Reconnecting with Matter
Painting and Drawings
Until 4th December, 2021
Beam, Nottingham, UK
Plan your visit
Reconnecting with Matter
Eleanor Bartlett
Paintings and Drawings
7 October–4 December, 2021
We’re delighted to present an exhibition of the paintings and drawings of Eleanor Bartlett. With no formal training, Eleanor Bartlett (b. 1951) began producing art in her late fifties, after leaving a career in physiotherapy. Since then, she has built a highly distinctive body of work using tar, wax and metal paint as her mediums. Thick layers of tar, gouged marks across the surface of the canvas and the ethereal qualities of wax reconnects us with a tactile world. Bartlett consistently demonstrates the power and relevance of art made by the human hand. With ten solo show’s, multiple awards, interviews and reviews in leading press to her name, Bartlett is a painter who continues to capture the imagination. Works will be available for sale and will support a future publication by Beam Editions.
Anything that occupies physical space with mass and volume is matter. Soil is matter, leaves on a tree are matter, we are matter. Atoms are the basic units of matter and the defining components of the physical world. However, there are some things that are not matter. Light, sound and heat are forms of energy, but not physical matter.
These are some of the answers you get when you ask google ‘What is matter’, a kind of tinned version of physics; almost certainly not the real thing, but a simple and easily digestible version that satisfies a shallow enquiry.
Eleanor Bartlett manipulates her paintings into existence, using tar, a dark brown or black viscous liquid, obtained from a wide variety of organic materials. Commonly used as a building material, tar does not behave politely like traditional artists materials such as oil paint or acrylic. It does not allow the artist to manipulate the painting with free will, depicting a specific image, or transfer a fully formed concept onto canvas. These paintings are a negotiation between the artist’s will and the will of the material. A push and pull between the artist’s hand and the thick viscosity of the material itself. Many of the greatest paintings in history are a contrivance or a recreation of reality; depicting a scene, a person, a place or a time. Eleanor Bartlett’s paintings are something different.
They could be read like a record of the concluding moment in the negotiation between the artist and the material. The reduced colour palette draws our attention to recognising there is no such thing as black or white and there is no such thing as light and darkness. There is only a continuous state of flux. Matter is always in a state of flux and when faced with Bartlett’s paintings, it’s impossible not to see matter and energy as one.
Eleanor’s paintings are spared from an arbitrary use of colour, the ‘volume’ of the mark making becomes louder. The energy that connects the hand to the brush, to the canvas is a chain reaction that exposes a momentary expression of human decision making, pushing atoms against atoms, matter against matter.
When looking at Bartlett’s work, on the surface, we see beauty, but with more time we see truth. The title of this show, ‘Reconnecting with Matter’, Beam presents these paintings as an act against the erosion of the material world as we increasingly occupy the digital. Being able to ‘read matter’ is a part of being a fully literate human and perhaps the more time we spend in the virtual world, we will lose our ability to read the physical.
Spending time experiencing an Eleanor Bartlett work is to spend time recalibrating our minds, away from the virtual world, back into balance and reality.