ZALI MATTHEWS REVIEW FOR HOME @735 GALLERY GROUP SHOW ‘26.04.23’
In the living room hangs several monochromatic paintings by Anthony Bartok. Painted with acrylic pen on readymade white gesso board, these comic-like works comprise of images sourced from Google image searches and the artist’s own photographic archive, collaged into bemusing compositions featuring domestic interiors, cityscapes, human figures and animals. Obfuscated by their monochromacy, these composite images, with their odd and jilted narratives, are in danger of blurring into enmeshed compositions.
Bartok describes these works as unconscious and intuitive constructions devoid of clear narratives. “Take the duck,” he says in reference to Duck. “What does a duck symbolise?” It’s a question that, for Bartok, has no answer – like the images in his works, it resists interpretation. Through these disordered and seemingly random archival excavations into our hypermediated digital reality, Bartok creates works that wryly reflect on the incomprehensible and meaningless mass of images online.
JOE FROST TEXT FOR HOME @735 GALLERY GROUP SHOW ‘26.04.23’
Mass media in any of its forms flattens the meaning of the visual imagery it presents. This was true fifty years ago when direct reporting from the Vietnam War- the first television war - was interspersed with crisply produced commercials for soap and automobiles; it is just as true of today’s social media platforms, where anything can be made visible but nothing is able to assume enduring significance. It may be that our society consumes more disposable imagery than ever before but there is nothing new about the way that mass circulation platforms determine the values of our visual culture.
Anthony Bartok is part of a long lineage of artists who have dipped their hand into the incessant stream of ephemeral, media images and appropriated them to a critique of the conditions of our social existence, of how our norms and behaviours are manipulated for base commercial imperatives. I can’t think of anybody working today with drawing, painting and print media who does it better. His selection of source images, guided by a sure feeling for contradiction, exposes the deep strangeness of what the multitude are scrolling through daily. He is one of those rare artists whose work can elicit full-blown laughter, as the profane is set alongside the ridiculous to produce a riotously apt critique of modern life. In one memorable past work inflatable ‘tube men’ were shown rising and deflating in front of a field of fornicating figures, with a nameless male figure floating in indeterminate space, dressed for business; in the present body of work a young man and woman on a reality television show perform a full-mouth kiss for the camera, attended from all sides by a scattering of tiny, hard-hatted construction workers who are just as intent on executing their work.
A talented drawer with a strong capacity for visual invention, Bartok ponders the compositional construction of each work at length and insists on hand-drafting everything. His clean line doesn’t give much away and we might find comedy in the effort he makes to avoid any expressive flourish, but his line has a serious job to do: de-familiarising us from subjects usually rendered in photographic colour and consolidating the image in a newly essentialised form. If we give our attention to Bartok’s work we will find a sensitivity and interpretative dimension to his drawing that sets it well apart from its source images, producing shifts of emphasis that only a human eye and mind would arrive at or find significant.
The emphasis is not always on humour. Increasingly, Bartok concerns himself with the inherently mysterious nature of our transit through life. In the current exhibition it is the presence of animals in our constructed, socialised environments that changes the tone. A domestic cat strides across a suburban panorama as a free agent; Queen Elizabeth 2 extends the hand of royal greeting to an elephant. In both cases the human-ordained pecking order of the species appears to be precarious, as though a wildness that has long been suppressed could be about to assert itself. Perhaps the animals are a reminder that we, the humans, also possess a potential to step outside of the boundary lines.
I am never in doubt with Anthony Bartok that the picture of life I am being shown has been made with consciousness of the moral implications of aesthetic decisions. If his work implies that there is a bad guy we find him primarily in the massive conglomerates that trade in false, exploitative images but also in our own frailty as consumers and creators of such material. In my mind’s eye I see Bartok in front of the television with his head in his hands, uttering the words: how did it come to this? But the care that he takes in crafting his visual critiques and his openness to the possibility of an art that acknowledges ambiguity and mystery is itself a welcome assertion of what is worth fighting for in this world.
ELLIE WALSH TEXT FOR ‘REMOTE ACCESS’, GALERIE POMPOM NOV. 2020
Working within an oxymoronic scaffold of profound banality, Anthony Bartok engineers everyday contradictions to critically jab our current moment. In his new series of paintings and screen prints, incongruous couplings expose cross-pollinations of industry and individual at a time when notions of privacy have been turned inside out; when the melding of work life and home life is catapulting us into an age of remote access.
Remote Access extends Bartok’s subversive, rolling exposition of twenty-first century existence, where individual foibles unfurl against a global backdrop. In his hybridised scenes, selfish ambition waltzes with contemporary capitalism; religion with industrial globalisation, personal intimacies with pervasive technology. Hands pursed and head bowed, the businessman in Pray prays to capitalism in the metonymic form of a frenzied department store sale. His supplications are heard only by a stripper dancing on the perimeter, her pathos pulling into an orbit of loneliness, and futility.
After mining imagery from Google, Bartok hand traces, scans and digitally collages his compositions, sewing together mundane moments that become densely loaded. Baudrillard’s increasingly relevant notion of the hyperreal is at play here, as Bartok both draws from and creates a virtual image regime ripe with semiotic potential. For Baudrillard back in 1981, simulation is not a replica of reality but a hyperreality in its own right, composed of endlessly exchangeable signs of reality without any causal connection to a knowable real. In an era of remote access, the real and the virtual mingle indistinguishably and the hyperreal reigns strong.
Bartok’s flat colours and minimalist linework possess the infantile aesthetic a children’s book or cartoon, forming a kind of existential guidebook to contemporary life. Yet his works are not a pulpit for ‘changing the world’ or overt social commentary; rather they resound, in Bartok’s words, a ‘detached ruminating’ and ‘a bit of cheeky venting’. With a tragicomic tenor, he divulges our own complicity in the paradoxical absurdities of today.
DAVID GREENHALGH REVIEW FOR HOME @735 GALLERY GROUP SHOW ‘28.09.16’
Bartok seeks to emulate a children’s book, or a beginner’s guide to learning a language, in an effort to probe an infinitely complex set of concerns in the most simple of terms. The over-arching theme of an unhealthy society full of contradictory expectations could be written about endlessly: The inflated individualism of contemporary capitalism and the opposing, but not incompatible concerns of fame and loneliness in an age of digital interconnectedness are a rich vein of study.
Bartok seeks to distill these conditions down to absurdism. But not an absurdism obtained through exaggeration. This absurdity is in plain sight of us all, yet we take little notice of it. Or to put it another way: “Chloe is so angry about war, corruption and the environment that she posts a photo about it on Facebook”.