Art News

London based artist Oliver Rafferty’s Moonate on view at the Rod Barton Gallery

LONDON.- The show seems to be about meaning as a thing-in-itself – how we read things and come to understand things. It is the broader conversation that keeps cropping up in my thoughts about the work included: How does meaning arrive? Why do we assign certain meanings to certain things? What constitutes a meaning? Does everything have meaning? Can anything be a meaning? Why are some meanings more valid than others? Meanings seem to be thrust upon us. It feels like meanings are not allowed to be how they naturally are and instead are forced down particular avenues for no valid reason. Any reasoning that diverts from these avenues is considered absurd. To restrict and push things to a certain meaning seems to be starving things of their potential. It feels like we have become slightly deluded, become so casual in reading things in certain ways that we are missing the point, blind to most of the information that is available to us, relying on the fictional meanings created by us,