Simeon Barclay
About this work
Playing Mas (2014) by Simeon Barclay is a wall-mounted mixed-media panel on an aluminium ground (119 x 90 x 2.7 cm) whose brushed silver surface holds small photographic decals and vinyl-adhesive lettering like objects pinned to a clinical stage. The composition is spare: a wide, horizontal photographic fragment of muscled, body‑builder legs runs across the field; two isolated letters—BO and YS—are printed in muted cyan/green and read together as BOYS; and a small photographic patch reproduces British conceptual artists Gilbert and George in suited, sculptural pose. Two narrow yellow bars punctuate the left-hand quadrant, their warmth interrogating the panel’s cool restraint.
Barclay’s decisions are exact. The aluminium’s reflective flatness compresses pictorial depth so the cropped musculature reads less as a portrait and more as sculpture, a carved mass severed from narrative. The BO/YS letters do the opposite work: typographic and declarative, they name the composition’s address and register the photograph as an object of designation. Placing the small Gilbert and George image near the enlarged limb tightens a lineage—British conceptual performance and cultivated body‑culture—into an economy of scale where costume, pose and flesh collide. The decal seams and vinyl edges remain visible; reproduction is not concealed but made legible.
Seen alongside Barclay’s broader practice—his archives of fashion imagery, stagecraft and industrial finishes—Playing Mas reads as a study in display. The panel stages masculinity as curated commodity: cropped, captioned, and arranged to reveal how desire and spectacle are manufactured. Its final effect is coolly analytic yet pointed: images pulled from performance and popular culture are arrested on aluminium and become objects to be measured, named and reappraised.
