City Dwellers

Faces, hands and bodily fragments share a pink field without the familiar boundaries of a conventional portrait. Barbier’s city dwellers appear close together yet difficult to assemble, a visual tangle of proximity and separation. The painting appears in her documented quarantine series, developed from drawings and the emotional experience of isolation. That context gives the crowded arrangement an extra charge: even when company fills the image, connection can remain complicated, funny and elusive.