Barry Reigate's practice comprises of an engagement with cultural exhaustion and an inevitably doomed attempt to find an escape from the impasse imposed by our present historical conditions through the imagined freedom of play.
The work takes its initial cues from both the overloaded world of our consumer culture and the equally crowded landscape of post-war Modern and contemporary art. With the latter partially and lamely mirroring the former, both exhibit the over-familiar recycling and re-formation of images, signs and symbols to create a seemingly endless supply of new iterations of consumable items, whether material or immaterial. Invoking the spirit of the first, darker and critical, flourishing of Pop Art and combining that with the tactics of formal repetition employed in various strands of Conceptual and Minimal Art, Reigate has developed a language that, with calculated coolness, manifests the degenerate and terminal stage of our visual culture.
Beyond being, as it were, a History painter of sorts, Reigate has consistently explored notions of Play as at least a personal route out of the inertia of a fin de siècle cultural moment. Drawing on the traditions of Art Brut, Magritte's little regarded Vache period works and the works of Asger Jorn, Reigate attempts to imagine and deploy Play as a site of resistance or immunity from the instrumental demands placed on culture by capital.
