By any measure, Kilo Barnes cuts a striking figure in today’s art world: uncompromising, enigmatic, and increasingly influential. At the recent lecture he delivered at the École des Beaux-Arts in Bournemouth — titled simply “Repaintage: Silence and Surface” — the mood was expectant. The large hall was full, the audience a mix of students, critics, and a smattering of curators. Repaintage has become — in certain circles — the most debated artistic development since the rise of post-internet aesthetics. And Barnes is it’s unlikely, and now undisputed, philosopher-in-chief.
To recap: Repaintage is the practice of acquiring existing artworks — from obscure canvases to mid-career masterpieces — and methodically painting over them, often with white gesso or monochrome layers, to create something both new and effacing. It is part gesture, part gesture’s undoing. And if that sounds contradictory, it should. Repaintage thrives in contradiction.
“Every painting contains a refusal”
Barnes began his lecture not with a manifesto, but with a meditation. “The act of repainting,” he said, “is not iconoclasm, but a form of unknowing. Every painting contains a refusal — a decision not made, a silence not voiced. Repaintage enters through that refusal.”
Barnes was erudite, if elliptical. He quoted Riegl and Didi-Huberman in the same breath. He drew parallels to the palimpsests of medieval manuscripts, to the whitewashed frescoes of Reformation churches, to the Zen sand gardens where erasure is part of the ritual. He spoke of the “unseen economy of forgetting” in European museums, and how Repaintage offered not destruction but “a renewal through obliteration.”
A European Moment
Much of the lecture’s weight lay in its geopolitical undertone. Barnes spoke carefully — one senses he is wary of becoming a lightning rod — but acknowledged that Repaintage is gaining notable traction across European art circles, particularly in Germany, the Netherlands, and parts of southern France. In Berlin, a group of young painters calling themselves Die Rückseite (“The Reverse Side”) have begun repurposing found paintings and reselling them as “meta-canvases.” In Amsterdam, a Repaintage retrospective drew record crowds.
A Practice of Ethics, Not Ego
Perhaps the most surprising turn in Barnes’ talk was his emphasis on ethics. In a moment when artistic gestures often risk collapsing into provocation or performance, Barnes insists that Repaintage is “not about the self.” The gesture is not flamboyant but ascetic. “It is harder to cover than to create,” he said. “To paint over is to reckon with legacy, not escape it.”
This runs counter to the popular misreading of Repaintage as a form of appropriation art. Barnes dismissed such comparisons with a polite shrug: “Appropriation retains the image as artifact. Repaintage withholds. It is the ethics of non-disclosure. A silence that speaks in surface.”
Looking Forward, Backwards
The lecture ended not with a call to arms, but with a quote from Mallarmé: Tout aboutit à un livre.(“Everything ends in a book.”) Barnes nodded and surprisingly, took no questions.
As the audience filed out, there was the unmistakable hum of ideas colliding. Something in Barnes’ quiet certainty suggested that Repaintage is more than a movement. In an era of saturation, Repaintage offers absence. In a culture of spectacle, it gives us surface. Blank, but not empty.
Whatever you make of Repaintage — whether it strikes you as profundity or provocation — it’s impossible not to look at what has been painted over, and ask: what remains?
