In an age when images flicker past at the speed of a thumb swipe—flattened, filtered, and frequently doubted—Colleen Barry poses a quietly radical question: what would it mean to believe in pictures again? Her exhibition Iconophilia at Half Gallery does not offer easy answers. Instead, it constructs a sensorial argument—layered in oil, myth, and flesh—that images still possess the power to anchor us, disturb us, and, perhaps most importantly, move us toward reverence.

Barry’s paintings do not compete with the algorithmic churn of contemporary visual culture; they slow it down. They insist on duration. They demand belief.

The Crisis of the Image

The unease surrounding images today is palpable. Children scroll past photographs with suspicion, quick to dismiss them as synthetic. Adults, no less wary, interrogate pictures as if authenticity were a vanishing currency. Barry recognizes this shift not as a technological anomaly, but as part of a longer historical rhythm—one that echoes cycles of iconoclasm, when images were feared, destroyed, or stripped of authority.

Yet Barry turns toward its opposite: iconophilia—the love of images. Her work does not deny contemporary skepticism; it metabolizes it. In paintings like Janus Novus, she stages improbable visual unions—melding the visage of Grace Jones with the bifurcated Roman god Janus—to create hybrid icons that refuse fixed meaning. These compositions feel at once ancient and uncannily current, as if excavated from both the ruins of Pompeii and the depths of the digital archive.

Barry’s approach is neither nostalgic nor ironic. It is devotional in tone, yet ambiguous in intent. Her images hover between belief and doubt, asking viewers to inhabit that fragile threshold.

Maternal Archetypes and Animal Symbols

Barry’s figuration is grounded in the body—solid, weighty, and unapologetically present. Her women are not ethereal muses but sculptural presences, rendered with a tactile density that recalls both classical statuary and early modern painting. In Orange She-Wolf with Infants, she revisits the ancient myth of Romulus and Remus, reimagining the iconic wolf as both nurturer and enigma.

The painting pulses with earthy reds and mossy greens, its palette evoking fertility and decay in equal measure. The maternal body becomes a site of convergence—where myth, autobiography, and biological fact intertwine. This motif extends into works like Origo, where a monumental pregnant figure towers over miniature companions, echoing prehistoric fertility idols such as the Venus of Willendorf.

Here, Barry collapses time. The contemporary mother becomes an ancient symbol; the ancient symbol becomes urgently present.

Barry’s method is as rigorous as it is intuitive. Trained through an informal apprenticeship with Sam Adoquei, she employs a classical process: preparatory drawings, transfer cartoons, small oil studies, and finally, the completed canvas. This layered approach imbues her paintings with structural integrity, allowing spontaneity to emerge within discipline.

Her brushwork oscillates between lush, almost edible passages of paint and areas where the underpainting breaks through—ruptures that remind the viewer of the painting’s material reality. Flesh tones glow with a yellowed luminosity, while chromatic contrasts—an orange wolf against a green void—heighten the emotional charge.

These are not images designed for instant consumption. They unfold slowly, like rituals.

Barry’s trajectory complicates easy categorization. Raised on New York’s Lower East Side, she navigated between working-class pragmatism and glimpses of cultural opulence—visits to Metropolitan Museum of Art, exposure to elite interiors through her father’s craft. Her early proximity to Julian Casablancas and the indie music scene of the early 2000s further shaped her sensibility, instilling a belief in self-direction over institutional validation.

Rejecting formal art school, Barry spent a decade immersed in European art history, studying firsthand the visual languages of antiquity and the Renaissance. This self-fashioned education informs her work’s temporal elasticity: her paintings feel unmoored from a single era, suspended between past and present.

Painting Against the Current

Barry’s Iconophilia arrives at a moment when painting’s relevance is frequently questioned. Why return to such an ancient medium in an era dominated by screens? Her answer is neither defensive nor polemical. Instead, it is embodied in the work itself.

Painting, in Barry’s hands, becomes a counter-medium—resistant to speed, resistant to disposability. It offers what digital images cannot: weight, texture, and the possibility of sustained encounter.

Her figures, often depicted with closed eyes, invite projection rather than recognition. They are not portraits but vessels—open forms that the viewer completes. This refusal of fixed identity aligns her practice with broader questions of subjectivity and perception, recalling how easily images can harden into doctrine, and how urgently they must remain fluid.

Barry does not seek to restore a lost purity to images. Her ambition is more nuanced: to reawaken a capacity for belief without naivety. In Petrine, a self-portrait veiled by a clay mask, only the artist’s luminous blue eyes remain visible—a reminder that perception itself is an illusion, shaped by light and interpretation.

This tension—between surface and depth, appearance and meaning—animates the entire exhibition. The paintings seduce, but they also resist. They invite intimacy while withholding certainty.

In doing so, Barry repositions painting not as a relic, but as a living, adaptive language—one capable of addressing the anxieties of the present while drawing strength from the past.

Iconophilia does not shout. It does not compete for attention. Its power lies in its insistence on slowness, on touch, on the enduring mystery of the image.

Barry’s paintings suggest that belief is not a given; it is a practice. And in a culture saturated with images yet starved of trust, that practice feels unexpectedly urgent.