MAKE MINE A MOLOTOV

About

Bartle uses the mass media images that form part of our every day experience, sampling and transferring these into cellular panels, clustering them together to form savage new images, ‘visual tumors'. Presented like sliding panel puzzles, they have a sense of transience - also mirrored in the textured, almost nostalgic surfaces that are created by the actual transferring process. Compositions that appear fixated upon one particular event become ephemeral - displaying the potential to be shifted or rearranged both physically and in the imagination. That which is depicted, though seemingly static, is therefore in a constant state of flux and appears at times beyond history or any given moment. Bartle's work at once feels like a premonitory dream and an historical document. Despite its often anger inducing and saddening subject matter, the work paradoxically offers a sense of pleasure and visual harmony. Through its manifestation the artist succeeds in creating order out chaos, as well as reconciling the bridge between a utopian and dystopian world - a balance is created in all our worlds.