The catalogue for a 2014 Daniel Barkley exhibition at the Musée d’Art Contemporain des Laurentides in Saint-Jerome, Quèbec, includes an excellent introduction to his work:

The dramatic intensity Daniel Barkley’s paintings emanate attracts and holds the eye with such strength that the works disturb, fascinate, and intrigue the viewer. We try to understand, to scrutinise the expressions of the figures, to connect to what they are experiencing. At times we want to be there, to take part in the ritual, the dream, the drama that is unfolding before us. Barkley leads us back into those unresolved, worried, anxious places deep within ourselves, without ever lapsing into the facile or the morbid. The viewer might feel uneasy faced with certain cathartic scenes, faced with the absurd realism of the paintings which feature nightmarish imagery, or with the fixed stares of some of the figures. Nevertheless, a seemingly magical attraction radiates from these works.
     In all of these paintings, the naked body is featured openly, simply without artifice. Stripped of its clothing-mask, endowed with a raw, never indecent, nudity; the expressive power of the figure increases tenfold. In this way, it seems to convey the whole truth of its emotion, the intense reality of the inner drama being lived, the fragility of its physical shell. The body, sometimes covered by golden mud, sometimes soiled with black oil or tattooed with esoteric signs and symbols, takes on poses that indicate ecstasy, madness or the dream state.
 
In this selection of Daniel Barkley’s paintings we have grouped them by their dominant theme – naked portraits, ‘blue’ paintings featuring bodies clothed in blue dye, ‘gold’ paintings similarly adorned with gold leaf, bicycles, wooden horses, boats (including his Embarcation, 2002, and Ship of Fools, 1997), and finally Exorcism (1999), Road to Bethesda (1997), and Procession (2002), concluding with two of his very few paintings of women, Susana as Saint Roch (2005) and The Anchoress (2005).