West, London
Ana Barriga
Say Cheese
Carl KostyálCarl Kostyál is delighted to present Say Cheese a new body of work by Spanish artist Ana Barriga (b.1984 Jerez de la Frontera, Spain) for the artist's debut London exhibition with the gallery. "My work involves instinct and attitude. This happens not only when I’m in search of the right object, which is when I’m in huntress mode, when I’m super focused on precisely identifying and capturing the day’s prey. That’s also the attitude that I have when I’m painting.” —Ana Barriga A colorful juggernaut of a painter who flourishes in mobile studio mode while admixing what used to be termed hyperrealism and rummage-sale-inflected pop, her generative example inspires a correction to the verse’s celebrated reprise. Put succinctly, the Spaniard’s is a spirited case of the heart as a happy huntress. Barriga’s paintings, which a close friend of hers pegged perfectly—along with their creator—as both “pretty and raffish,” begin with what the artist terms “bits of reality that no longer mean anything.” By this she means plastic figurines, tchotchkes, porcelain doo-dads and bits of bric-a-brac she encounters on regular visits to flea markets, souks, bazaars, rastros and marchés au puces. These she “sources,” “breaks,” “paints,” “manipulates” and otherwise “transforms” into tabletop arrangements, which she then photographs to use as jumping off points for her celebrated oil and enamel canvases of smudged, graffitied, sprayed and otherwise altered kitsch fantasias. Barriga’s interventions accentuate and transmogrify the meanings of her irremediably secondhand, erstwhile personal objects. Restaged by the painter like so many multicolored troll dolls, her objets trouvés acquire ever-novel combinatory meanings—think hand painted tarot cards regularly scattered and put back together—while suggesting, among other referential possibilities, the sincere embrace of homage and the pleather lash of ironic distancing. Yet there remains throughout the artist’s streetwise borrowings a nod toward painting’s history. Picture Giorgio Morandi still-lifes animated by maneki-neko cats, M&M colored statuary and devilish putti. —Christian Viveros-Fauné, Brooklyn, 2022