Oliver Barratt
There is a lovely simplicity to the work of Oliver Barratt. His shapes are so pure and uncluttered and clean. They inscribe balletic curves across the spaces of his studio. They loop, swell and billow with a sensual ease. And it all looks so effortless that it almost feels familiar: as if his forms have somehow been lifted straight out of life. Is that the bulge of a seed pod, or a bean or a buttock? Is that a telephone, or a bottle, or a penguin or a ball?
Barratt flirts lightly with such figurative allusions. But he never lets them get fixed. His forms - like his ideas - are all about fluidity. Over weeks, even months, he works patiently in partnership with his materials and following his intuitions as they wander off and develop into more complex ideas: ideas which he then encapsulates in his playful titles - which then double back neatly to enter the land of intuition again.
Just when you think you have fixed on some pattern, spotted a rhythm or found some underlying reason, it suddenly eludes you and dissolves back into space. And you find yourself setting off on some fresh line of enquiry, speculating upon new possibilities and open to a totally different set of odds.
Barratt does not offer any easy answers. He articulates the problems which his pieces then solve with an almost mathematical grace. He explores the processes (rather than the end products) of communication. And he proffers his suggestions with an enticing sensuality and a teasingly eloquent wit.
Maybe this is the deeper appeal and more lasting pleasure of his sculptural pieces. Nothing he makes is ever quite as simple as it looks.
Rachel Campbell Johnston
Chief Art Critic, The Time, August 2006