Clashio Barbarani

'Clashio Barbarani' is a sort of composite of elements of my given name and my (other) artist's name – I also have works on this site as 'Prem Shashi'. But mainly it reflects my unashamed love of brilliant colour and maximalist complexity, a taste that seems almost 'barbarian' in the context of the lasting fashionable flirtation with cool, neutral or dull colours and minimalism's 'terrible simplification' of form and composition.

These photographic works took shape when I began travelling extensively in India and South and Southeast Asia, taking pictures of the fabulous old temples, forts, palaces, gardens and bazaars I revelled in on a relatively inexpensive compact digital camera. These sometimes otherworldly architectural realms evoked for me a vision of a glorious fairy-tale age of splendour and a more contemplative, aesthetic way of life.

Wanting to conjure up yet more fantastical visions than the places themselves afforded me, I began to play around with the colour and exposure dials in the old Apple iPhoto app and in Photoshop, sometimes also adding in mirroring or/and layering or collaging effects. The resulting works often evoked my feeling of being in these magical places more strongly than the original natural photogr...

Although I started a foundation arts course in my home town of Farnham, not far from London, I left when I realised the 'conceptualist' bias of the time meant I would not be encouraged at all in the pursuit of the old-fashioned focus on beauty and rich decorative detail that were essential to my artistic expression.

So I studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London instead, going on to obtain a doctorate with a thesis about the influence of esoteric philosophy, alchemy and magic on the writers and artists of the Surrealist movement. I lived in Paris for many years while researching this thesis.

Realising I did not want to be an academic, I then took a course in periodicals journalism at the LCP in London, and moved into art and travel journalism. It was broadly through working for numerous glossy magazines as a freelance subeditor that I started to become familiar with tools such as Photoshop, which I eventually taught myself in order to create these photographic-based digital works.

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