Safety 4 Painting

Peter Barelkowski’s paintings are situated in cloudlike non-spaces, where figures and objects float like ideas in fields of colour. These spaces become the sites for events which are outside of time, events that are simultaneously trauma and aftermath, story and memory. The traumas that appear to be endlessly replayed are both historical and existential, events that seem gritty and real but situated in spaces that are dreamlike and intangible. At times these spaces are granted the primordial distinction between land and sky in its rawest form – a cleaving hori-zon – creating the realms of the upper and lower. At other times the severing of the space comes in the form of a box, which separates the inside from the outside. It either case the separations create a power dynamic between two fields. The first occupied by looming over-seers: uniformed authorities, towering matrons, and giant birds. The latter is the realm of the masses huddled in cells and cellars, and the mundane trappings of the everyday: bottles, and chairs. These spaces, however, are not without hope. A ladder appears in nearly every work.This recurring motif offers the promise of escape through ascension.