Private View: BARRY REIGATE | PLAY WORKS / Play

Private View: BARRY REIGATE | PLAY WORKS

8th Oct 2009

PARADISE ROW - BARRY REIGATE | PLAY WORKS

Comprising of paintings, sculptures and drawings, Barry Reigate's exhibition presents a riotous, chaotic, carnivalesque universe in which depraved cartoonish creatures, hyper-violent and clearly on heat, cavort, playing malevolently with their pudenda as well as with signs, forms and references.

In the paintings inhabitants from the studios of Disney and Warner Brothers collide in a painterly netherworld that recalls the jackdaw style of Basquiat.

In a highly moving subtext, intelligible only with knowledge of the highly private, autobiographical facts that I am about to tell you, the works mainline straight into the personal history of the artist. As a child Reigate was largely taught to draw by his identically named father, Barry James Reigate, imprisoned, at the time, in Wandsworth Prison, who used to send Barry Jr. postcards dotted with the figures of Tom and Jerry, Mickey Mouse and so on. From an early age, then, Reigate (Jr.), associated art and creativity with escape, an association Reigate has sought to deepen in his adult years. Accordingly all these works vividly demonstrate Reigate's commitment to stupidity and fun as the primary impulse and final purpose of art making but also attempt to serve as puerile metaphors for the dynamics of power within human societies.

Barry Reigate's works have been chosen for the Saatchi Gallery collection.