TERRAIN VAGUE - Selected Work

September 25- October 30, 2021

A Solo Exhibition David Barnes

"The images of terrain vague are territorial indications of strangeness itself, and the aesthetic and ethical problems that they pose embrace the problematics of contemporary social life. What is to be done with these enormous voids, with their imprecise limits and vague definition? Artists seek refuge in the margins of the city precisely when the city offers them an abusive identity, a crushing homogeneity, a freedom under control. The enthusiasm for these vacant spaces - expectant, imprecise, fluctuating - transposed to the urban key, reflects our strangeness in front of the world, in front of our city, before ourselves." - Ignasi de Solà-Morales

"Spanish architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales refers to Terrain Vague as the "in between" spaces on the urban outskirts. Parking lots, empty plots, abandoned buildings and all the uninhabited sprawl beyond the city limits that makes up a sort of urban non space. I chose this title for my show because much of my work deals with this type of space. Not only physical terrain vague, but also psychological and spiritual places of uncertainty. As de Solà-Morales states, there is a "relationship between the absence of use, of activity, and the sense of freedom, void as absence, and yet also as promise, as encounter, as the space of the possible." Whether it's an abandoned utopian nudist colony in the California desert whose pools were discovered by nomadic skateboarders and turned into a different type of utopia represented by The Nude Bowl, or the ubiquitous graffiti covered concrete walls and foundations in the overgrown areas outside of town where teenagers meet to hang out, shown in Where Are You Going?, most of the paintings in this exhibit take place in a physical or metaphysical Terrain Vague."

-David Barnes

“Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It’s the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe."

-Philip Guston