Bo Bartlett at Miles McEnery Gallery in New York City: Art Exhibition Review

Bo Bartlett’s paintings, including those in the artist’s latest exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery in New York City, are dubious.

I rarely know precisely what story the scene is telling or how these characters got to their present place of rest or predicament, and even though Bartlett paints with realistic detail, the scenes frequently appear staged, or at least captured with some kind of stage lighting that here feels latent within the imaginable scenes to which Bartlett is hearkening and that he is developing in his art.

Like an actor giving it their all, ripping their passions from their chest, or quietly leaving them in front of the audience or camera, you feel the personal investment each figure has in what they’re doing. They’re trying their best. In trying, and in themselves not necessarily even knowing where their story is heading (do we ever?), they’re yearning, aching, and steeping themselves in the scene’s warmth, a blending of the physical environment and themselves. The momentary begins to consume. These painted figures want, and they want desperately. Their constructed and natural environments creak under the monumental, monolithic, growing push.

But you really don’t know what’s coming next, and it doesn’t look like anyone or anything does. It’s all a beautiful, ornate construction that might never be finished.

But Bartlett’s paintings are whole. In this exhibition, I saw little if any physical tension. Visually, even the more precarious scenes, like a massive, sweeping painting of figures (“Saudade,” from 2024) gathered on a seashore watching unexplained smoke rise from apparent ships in the distance, remained intact. The second in which we are looking upon this group, themselves gathered together in something you would expect would only be temporary, is not breaking.

Bartlett’s figures in this collection of paintings often looked still, like most of those in that painting of a shore, and if they were in apparent motion, you saw them at a moment of pause in the midst of all that. A slowdown. A realization. Watching, waiting, and wondering. Trying to take stock. The scenery itself left trying to assess, trying to grapple. Those on the beach trying to figure out if whatever was happening on the distant but visible surface of the water was a threat.

Everything here culminates in and remains fixed in a present moment. Depicted across this exhibition is the singular instance of the second in front of you as something truly all-encompassing and defining. When we are in these moments, we are looking, watching, wondering, and maybe heartily surprised, or even scared. But we are in that present moment and nowhere else. We are fixed, planted, growing. It’s a conception of home — a consistent theme of the exhibition — that travels with us. These seconds and their invisible progression are our warm home.

And I think that Bartlett’s exhibited art depicts precarity and vulnerability, delicate and gentle, in the face of that, because these captured seconds in each painting, no matter the size of the canvas itself: they feel huge. They feel religiously sweeping, like there is truly nothing else, as they are our salvation and our guiding, beckoning light. And I feel a tremble in the face of that. A fragility, asking for and being met by protection.

Bartlett physically manifests the feeling in each moment of our lives that the experienced moment will never happen again. It’s already becoming a memory, something greater than its physical, sum components, when we are in the midst of it. It’s already slowing down, taking a new shape: a grandiosity, a trembling touch, a wonder.

In the exhibition itself, I imagined the figures — like a central one in “Home,” from 2010 — who were looking outwards towards us, the viewer, as drawing the visitor in directly. But I also think they’re looking towards an imagined future. They’re feeling, physically, what spreads out around them and seeing the glimmer, the flicker of what comes next, starting to bloom already.

Time and again, Bartlett’s exhibited paintings are lit to a heavenly intensity, though he maintains that aesthetic realism. But this consuming light that spreads throughout the exhibition, touching every surface, does not end.

“Bo Bartlett” is continuing through March 15 at Miles McEnery Gallery.

Featured image: “Bo Bartlett” (installation view), Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, January 30 – March 15, 2025. Image courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery and the artist.