Nightjars is an exhibition of selected works by Norfolk based artist Darren Barker. The paintings, all of which are oil on canvas, are awkward, sometimes sentimental, comical, and unsettling, they express an ambiguous narrative through colour and figures.
Barker who graduated from Canterbury School of Art in1990 uses people and places, myths, folklore, and memories as his subject matter. He is repeatedly drawn to the same two places for inspiration, the marshes around his home where he loses himself and most importantly a remote village in Northern Bulgaria where he spends a lot of his time.
The people and experiences from these places enter the paintings through a vivid exploration of intimacy, identity, and transformation through expressive figuration. There is a tension between vulnerability and vitality smeared with paint, thick in places and scored with a palette knife. The work is visceral and felt rather than known.
Larger paintings display a charged mythic atmosphere where Edenic or mythological themes emerge. Across the series there are recurring motifs and symbols which seem unrelated and create a secret visual code, personal and difficult to decipher. Stories are not illustrated but reinterpreted half remembered and half mangled with memories.
The figures often nude are fragmented or entwine and exist in a dream space where faces dissolve into colour fields and bodies become landscapes of gestures and feelings.
Bodies are exaggerated, stretched, constricted, the distortion amplifying the theatrical energy. They appear choreographed and held in position as if fixed. Figures feel like actors on stage rather than inhabitants giving way to the sense that human behaviour is always a kind of performance, a theatre of absurdity.
The use of animal skulls evokes ritual, transformation, and the merging of human and animal instinct, shamanism and ancient tales. Pale expressive faces beneath masks often with features scratched into the paint adds a layer of vulnerability – almost as if the mask is both protection and burden.
Couples feature many times in the paintings showing both intimacy and distance, a togetherness and solitude. The figures are with one another, but their emotional worlds are always depicted as separate. A connection that is never complete and undergoing continual negotiation. An unsettling combination of tenderness and vacancy.
The artist’s work has been described as bold, unapologetic, and visually confrontational but still allows the viewer to linger and decode. Paintings refuse to settle into one meaning, they are emotional without being literal, symbolic without being didactic, an invitation to discomfort, beauty and ambiguity.
Barker too is unapologetic he paints because he wants to and for no other reason
