A foreword by Elana Kroneberg John Adam Barrow is a Cape-Town-born fine artist of English-Swedish descent. Working exclusively with oil-on-canvas, John paints from his home studio in De Waterkant- a neighbourhood nestled within the city bowl of Cape Town. John is formally trained as an architect. Working first as a freelance architect in Stockholm, Sweden, he undertook a series of solo projects in the city for which his debut project, an Italian Espresso Bar in Stockholm’s city center, earned him early success. He then moved on to become a partner in a Stockholm-based architectural firm. From the period succeeding his undergraduate qualification at the University of Cape Town up to early middle age- John spent his years traveling, furthering his architectural studies, and practicing as an architect in Europe. His time in Europe immersed him in the arts, developing his knowledge and appreciation for Western art and architecture. John also painted as a hobbyist throughout this time. The artist’s work often celebrates the bold colours, patterns, and lively spirit of the African continent (drawing inspiration from African national flags as well as from the acclaimed South African artist, Esther Mahlangu). However, there is no doubt as to the extent to which his frequent visits to the celebrated museums in Europe’s artistic centers influenced his artistic sensibilities and appreciation of history. Despite early success in a foreign land as well as the promise of a prosperous career trajectory in his field, John decided by early middle age to return to Cape Town, the place of his birth, to pursue his lifelong passion and calling as an artist. Since his return to South Africa and up to the present day, John has produced numerous works, with an oeuvre totaling just over one hundred original oil-on-canvas paintings. I will list his works in broad categories later, but I will give particular focus to John’s most recent work, Space-Time (completed between 2022 and 2024) below. Space-Time: a Meta-narrative for the Metacrisis is a six-part series portraying the human drama playing out on a grand scale. One could think of Space-Time as being “mereological” in its approach. Mereology, simply put, is a branch of philosophy that explores the relationships between the various parts of the whole and the relationships of those parts, to the whole. My background in environmental sciences taught me to frame this as “complexity theory” or even “ecological thinking” but John’s penchant for schematic reasoning, through images, disabused me of such a conflation. John won’t necessarily call these works “mereological”, his autonomy and processes as an artist is central to his image-making, even though people such as myself might prefer some additional text to skin out teeth into. An artist’s process of turning ideas into images is, no doubt, more enigmatic than what I can offer here in words. John enjoys speaking about his works and the multiple layers of ideas, images, techniques and social relevance, etc., and what’s more, he does so very well. Still, I invite you to read the additional theory laid out here, which includes some of my personal impressions of his works. This is a complement, not an explanation, of his works. But let’s continue to run with mereology for now (mainly because I have a problem with the scale). When thinking about human drama on the Grand Scale, I must ask: how is it possible to conceive of this in a world where even the world’s best experts struggle to understand the “whole” it in all its complexity, let alone compute the myriad of it’s ever-changing parts? Scholars Graham Leicester and Maureen O’Hara (2009) expand on this idea, offering the useful term “conceptual emergency”. See a quote from their text below (Leicester and O’Hara., 2009, p. 7): “The world we have created has outstripped our capacity to understand it. The scale of interconnectivity and interdependence has resulted in a step change in the complexity of the operating environment. These new conditions are raising fundamental questions about our competence in key areas of governance, economy, sustainability, and consciousness. We are struggling as professionals and in our private lives to meet the demands they are placing on traditional models of organisation, understanding, and action. The anchors of identity, morality, cultural coherence, and social stability are unraveling and we are losing our bearings. This is a conceptual emergency.” John develops his own conceptualization of these issues, not for the sole purpose of theorizing and thinking about these things. His practice of image-making is an invitation for the viewer to feel into what it means to be alive in these times as we struggle to perceive who we are and what we need to do. Subjective as it may be, Space-Time is John’s visual elaboration, in spirited colour and vivid detail, of the whole and its parts. It is his perception of context- his contribution to the conversation and culture. (It is interesting to note that this is not the first time John has employed a mereological approach to his paintings which deal with similarly large themes. His four-part series produced between 2014-2017, titled “We’re Skewed: an artist’s critique of Modernity.” was the first to do so (included in this catalogue are the paintings titled Risk Society (2017) and Boxed-in (2016)). |