Sehnsucht, part and parcel of alternative pop culture, experienced by many teenagers during the time their bodies are wriggling under their skins, but usually left behind when coming of age, is Joan van Barneveld’s expressive theme.
Through collaboration, Onomatopee and Joan will develop new work and reflect on its territory. This becomes visible in a solo exhibition in the format of a studio space setting at Onomatopee, which will tour via Los Angeles gallery Paul Loya. At Onomatopee, events like talks and music sessions will rock the foundations and stimulate outcomes. A publication will be launched at the end of the working period, condensing it and taking it beyond the confines of the residency.
Joan van Barneveld plays the deep desires and visual processes of pop culture. His earlier work energises the visual poetics of grunge culture, the 90s revitalisation of punk’s counterculture, into the present. In paintings made up in black, he projects iconic images of this culture, both on stage and elsewhere. In these, people remain absent, but the feedback of the intensity of this cultural movement is 'condensed' behind a veil of black layers. By using this technique, the longing is placed behind an optical membrane, which does not suppress it as much as situates its introverted grandeur behind the curtain constituted by this dark skin.
In recent developments within his work, the energy shifts to a deeper, romantic longing for an essential horizon, narrated in a visually wider manner. He continues to work with blacks and depicts cultural spaces without humans, to process pictures from the public or private sphere releasing a similar charge as when they are ‘condensed’ by shading. Thus, the development of his oeuvre is also a figured and narrated coming of age, evolving the intensity of the original grunge energy he used. The work becomes more layered: as a spectator you can explore narrative links within series, diptychs or triptychs. This enables the evolvement of a temporal transfer of the intensity in his work over a longer period of time, becoming more layered and more powerful in the adult world where positions are more and more fixed and iconic totems possess less strength: the flatness of pop becomes a wide desolate opening into the rock which underlies it.
Fuck pop, go poetry.
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A studio-exhibition/author exhibition curated by Onomatopee
February 8th – March 30th
open Saturday and Sunday’s 13:00-15:00
EVERY WEDNESDAY, 18:00-22:00
Joan will be working at Onomatopee, where you can join him in his temporary studio at irregular hours but for sure on Wednesday evenings.
Friday March 28th, 20:00
Finissage with SPECIAL GIG BY NAIVE SET
