Chris Barley considers himself as a bit of a "nomad" as he has spent a large part of his life travelling the world. He is originally from France but has lived away from his homeland for over 25 years now, in Africa, East Asia and now the Middle East. He also has a background in psychology and martial arts, years of studies of the body and the mind. While he would prefer to keep his personal life stories and his emotional ups and downs secret, he can say that he had a strong urge to find a creative way to externalise his life experience and all the emotions and memories that had not been expressed and so he turned to painting. As an "immigrant" or "expatriate", however you would like to label it, his work is infused with all the cultures and atmospheres he has experienced. As a scholar of the body and the mind, energy and thought, he attempts to resonate with peoples' unconscious through his art. He usually exhibits abstract, modern paintings, with a style that could be called “Abstract Expressionism". Strong influences for him have been Jackson Pollock with his technique of "action painting" and others part of this movement such as Hans Hofmann, Lee Krasner, or Joan Mitchell. His technique shares many similarities, being expressive and radical, going beyond superficial appearances and expressing his deepest emotions, revealing a certain psychic intensity. He has a fascination for the relationships be-tween energy, the body and the mind and is dedicated to the expression of emotions and energies through colours, textures, and movement. Due to their abstract nature, he likes his paintings to speak for themselves and prefers to preserve the mystery behind them and not share his own state of mind when painting them. He says: “The paintings speak very differently to every-one depending on their relationship with colours or textures and what emotions or memories they bring up in them. The titles might sometimes give a bit of a hint, but he would rather not give more information as to not influence viewers’ own interpretations.”