Alvaro Barrington paints very quickly, but the approach can take years of study and fitful epiphany. When it comes, his stroke is kinetic, smoked-out, conveying nothing less than the clash that birthed the black Atlantic. What painting means to him is complicated. What does it mean for the painter to fabricate a carnival dancer out of aluminium, reaching three metres tall? To wrap a sofa in plastic, evoking his grandmother in Grenada? Barrington sublimates personal memory, pop culture, and his study of art history into a Creolised, recombinant aesthetic, driven by a daunting ambition to convey how blackness sees itself from the inside.
Barrington’s installation Labor Day Parade ’91 references memories of the West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn. It arrives generating its own weather. There is irresoluble tension in the discordance of materials: a truck wrapped in painted Kuba tapestries, its illuminated carcass housing a cell block installation with metal figurines and a winged rope sculpture. There is the crackling sense of the Caribbean syncretic, as embodied by Barrington’s rewriting of European modernism or New Testament scenes, his subversion of the foundational images of the sin and its sinners as agents of liberation. And there is, most viscerally, the feeling of movement – relentless, forward, against all odds.
—Doreen St-Félix
