WAYNE BARKER - Migration Through Borderless Light

PRESS RELEASE

18A0575

WAYNE BARKER - Migration Through Borderless Light
Jan 22 – Feb 28, 2025

“You can never get bored in a garden”

On Wayne Barker’s new paintings made in his garden at the edge of nowhere

By Sean O’Toole

“I feel like Dr Doolittle sometimes,” says painter Wayne Barker of his new life as homebuilder, gardener and early-morning animal watcher in Komatipoort. Since acquiring a vacant lot in this rugged border town—established in 1887 at the confluence of the Crocodile and Komati Rivers in Mpumalanga, near South Africa’s principal border with Mozambique—Barker, a legendary figure in South African art circles, has built himself a home and studio here.

Barker’s homestead is a bit like a shack version of modernist pioneer J.H. Pierneef’s former home and painting studio, Elangeni, on the eastern edge of Pretoria. A fierce critic and admirer of Pierneef, Barker has opted for wood and corrugated iron over stone for his constructions. These materials are easily recycled, he says. And unlike Pierneef’s home, his property remains unnamed. For Barker, it’s simply home.

After moving to Komatipoort in 2021, Barker found himself stewarding a riverine woodland and garden, originally planted with mostly non-indigenous flora like Elephant Ear and Delicious Monster. Barker lightly inserted himself into this setting. Initially, he settled into a modest Wendy house but gradually expanded the property’s footprint. The grounds now include a stilted bedroom-bathroom construction (“tree house,” prefers Barker), a detached kitchen and dining area, a sprawling studio, and a plunge pool—all connected by dedicated paths under the property’s dense canopy. Additional features include fishponds, a vegetable patch, and a burgeoning granadilla plantation.

This tranquil sanctuary is shared with Ziggy, his Jack Russell cum Komatipoort special, a terrapin named Snowy, and over 80 species of birds, including a resident hawk. “I’ve got snails that are as big as feet,” adds Barker, his enthusiasms palpable. “Just look at the size of this leaf. Look at the light—it is almost rococo when the light shines into the garden.” The labours of maintaining the garden are a delight. “You can never get bored in a garden because there is so much to do.”

While the garden is a collaborative effort, Barker’s new paintings are entirely his own. An improvisatory merging of colours, rudimentary motifs and found objects, these bold and expressive canvas works draw direct inspiration from his garden’s vibrancy. Birds, dogs and potted flowers (OMG, cut flowers in vases!) intermingle with his signature themes of Pierneef and consumer culture. The works are directly inspired by the elemental life of his garden, its surplus of beauty and horror. “It is ruthless what happens in nature,” he says, recalling seeing the hawk take out a flycatcher bird. “It has made me question many things.”

Barker’s garden also offers solace from broader turmoil. The violence in nearby Mozambique has disrupted the border, and faraway wars in the Middle East weigh on him. “When the wars broke out, I started bringing flowers from the garden into the studio,” he says. “I needed something beautiful to look at.” Dealer Mark Read correctly highlights the “light touch of wonder” and “tender insecurity” that inform Barker’s new suite of paintings.

Komatipoort’s vivid social and natural environment has been home to artists before Barker. In the 1890s, Frans Oerder, a contemporary of Pierneef and celebrated flower painter, lived here while working on the newly established railway line. Oerder noted the rowdy frontier quality of the settlement in a letter to a friend. Similarly, Barker, a Pretoria boytjie who first made a splash in 1980s Johannesburg with his scruffy neo-what-what paintings that merged Pierneef landscapes with consumer brands like Bakers Blue Label Marie biscuits, finds inspiration in this unpolished frontier.

Barker’s enduring engagement with Pierneef remains central to his art. One of his latest works features the ghostly outline of a Pierneef mountain range set against a mustard-coloured background. The composition includes a painter’s palette and a stick embedded with nail polish bottles attached to it. Barker acquired the stick from one of the young Mozambican men who illegally cross the border to offer grooming services to local women. The sticks are used to display each vendor’s unique selection of garishly coloured, Chinese-made nail polish.

The artist’s new paintings abundantly reflect his unbroken fascination with street ingenuity and consumer culture—something prompted by his years operating artist-run spaces on the eastern edge of Johannesburg’s CBD. The area’s working-class consumer culture greatly invigorated Barker’s earliest paintings, culminating in his fabulous assemblage paintings incorporating Coca Cola branding and neon.

A can-do informality is a hallmark of Barker’s paintings—and extends to his living circumstances. For a time, Barker’s homestead prompted deep frowns among Komatipoort’s stern townsmen. Those wrinkles have been smoothed over. Barker’s current challenges—repairing his stuffed Mini convertible rolled by a labourer on an errand, managing the predatory hawk, nurturing his granadilla plantation, and completing works in his studio—are balanced by his boundless enthusiasm for his garden and its vivid, sensory world.

In all of this he is a bit Claude Monet, whose late paintings—liquid abstractions that dissolve visible experience into sensory colour—Barker has seen in person and greatly admires. Much like this vaunted ancestor, Barker’s paintings do not simply replicate the beauty of his surroundings but translates it, channelling its energy into bold, feverish compositions. Painting is an occult practice, an alchemical transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary. For anyone doubting this, just look at Wayne Barker’s new paintings.

 

Sean O’Toole is a writer, editor and occasional curator based in Cape Town. He has published two books and edited three collections of essays.

 

For enquiries, please contact gallery@everard.co.za