HOST: Included in Belfast International Arts Festival, An exhibition exchange where eight artists interrogated one theme.

Starting from a single sentiment, “host”, each artist travelled a distance into their own narrative world, using the group prompt as a conceptual and methodical challenge. As a result, the work in the exhibition includes meditations on relationships with the natural world, places and traditions, architecture, each other, and with our thoughts and emotions.

Participating artists: Monika Crowley, Margot Galvin, Dan Henson, Mary O Connor, Alana Barton, Jonathan Brennan, Tim Millen and Esther O’Kelly. Curated by Moran Been-noon.

Exhibition review by Slavka Sverakova

“Alana Barton placed her twin paintings near each other as if squeezing out negative forces that may distort childhood or idealize it out of truth.

She used high key mixed media, both painterly and when printing as if to sweeten the deliberate absences in forms akin to the light skipping areas to give them to the shade. Safe in their imaginary world, they seem to show off their content with being.”

“While children looking out of the picture focus as if on the (absent) camera, the painter safely envelopes them with a net of irrational touches - hereby a saturated brush, thereby a dancing tip of a colour pencil.

I marvel that in spite of breaking continuity, the figures have presence and volume (!) and mood.

The mood is of a playful, sensual rococo tonality with touches of 20th Century abstraction and memories of children in the paintings of the late Renaissance. Still, they are of our time, of here and of now. Celebratory putti on renaissance painting of mythical figures rarely look out at the viewer. Some of Barton's do.

Making the play and portrait her subjects, she invites a reminiscing of the values created and lost during the children's play. Science stresses the significance of play in the growth of cognitive powers and also imagination which wiggles out at times from cognition.

Barton possesses certain virtuosity that allows avoiding pitfalls of the high key so light that it threatens to leave the ground like the bubble from the child's mouth.

I applaud this painter's resolve to paint children. During the 20th C, there were not many who developed that theme, genre. And if some tried, there was the unpalatable sweetness poisoning the genre out of refreshing modernism then, e.g. Marie Fialova-Kvechova.

And yes, there may be a substantial difference between portrait and illustration of the story, although many illustrations are portraits rooted in the words of the story, like putti's in the clouds relate to biblical stories, which illustrate the verbal as if they were portraits of living persons.”

Full review: