As I sit typing, spines of Tiffany-teal and burnt-orange tones catch my eye. The worn pile of Penguin Modern Classics perched beside my laptop is an odd place to start a review of Amelia Barratt’s solo exhibition Out of Hours (at A_Place, Glasgow, until 9 May 2025). Featuring six small paintings, the show is utterly engaging; it does not ask for comparative allusion, the paintings are what they are: a ragged assembly of layers of oil on canvas. That being said (I love to contradict myself), sitting, thinking, typing and looking between the photos of the exhibited artworks on my laptop screen and this pile of books, I cannot help but feel a resonance between Barratt’s impressionistic brushwork and the titles that adorn my pile. The connection seems more than surface deep. There is a sensibility here that lies enmeshed in a colourful use of form.
Neatly hung, unframed and unvarnished (I think), the six paintings in this exhibition welcome my gaze. Like a short classic, I can almost picture myself sitting down with each on an evening and getting lost in what they narrate to me. Looking at Plant, 2025, for example, and I see the bristles of a brown Chusan Palm edging a stream of faux-gold, a turquoise square dancing between them, oh so nonchalant, in the centre of this sunset scene. I feel that I know this image, or at least that I have witnessed it somewhere before: knackered after a days work, I have returned to my single-bed room to lie enveloped in a streetlight’s sticky beam — a state of oblique aliveness. I could talk about the metaphor in this projection, using my dreamy association to chat about city-life routines and how seeds of freedom (autonomy, living in a busy city) often grow into something more barbarous (isolation, merely surviving the working day). Sometimes you need a little light from an abstracted outside to render a living newly real to you.
That’s a grand statement. It’s the luminosity of painting. It’s haptic.
Barratt has constructed these paintings using fragments gleaned from the urban world; specifically from odd bits of mechanical detritus, street-side textures, and other forms of junk she has experienced through daily life. Embracing the formalities of painting, colour and shape, texture and line, Barratt connects this disparate matter in hodgpodge gushes, conjuring fabulated room scenes for me to wander into. Here, looking feels like reading; stuff from everyday life is pulled out and into loose focus through long planes of Proustian colour and Joycean stabs. With its painterly panels of reddish-brown being cut with dry trails of bright yellow and white, Nightstand, 2025, seems indicative of this material play. This clash of surface texture affords just enough illusion to create the impression of a lamp on a table, or rather an image of this setting as it lingers in the far-off reaches of my memory. Like Proust’s madeleine, this hazed mind-image replays for me now, making my present extra sensorial.
If writers such as Proust built their fictitious riff worlds from fragments of their day-to-day life, critiquing bourgeois perversity through linguistic sleights of hand, Barratt’s abstractions echo this transformation of the daily. From the stuff of urban decay to rich interior scenes, here the life and language of painting is used to elicit a double look; to create little windows that challenge my perceptions about how the world all about me is formed.
Amelia Barratt, Out of Hours 25th April — 9th May 2025 A_Place, Glasgow
