Nostalgia is a powerful thing, and Alvaro Barrington has let it go to his head. He’s built three shacks in the middle of the gallery at Sadie Coles HQ and filled them with art about his Caribbean youth. An immersive trip into his past.
Each one is a recreation of his family’s shacks in rural Grenada, one for his grandmother, one for his aunt, one for his uncle. Barrington left the island aged eight, and it has become a spectre of the past that haunts him. Not in a bad way, but instead as a series of mental images and memories that shapes who he is, and in turn shapes the paintings in this show. It’s like he’s asking ‘Who are we if not just a fuzzy composite of our past selves?’
There are semi-abstract images of crashing waves, a vast, blinding sunset, a woman diving into the sea repeated over and over. The paintings are stretched across corrugated iron, or sewn together with dangling ropes, pushing them closer towards sculptural, Rauschenberg-ilke assemblages than plain old paintings.
This is Barrington raising up other artists and revelling in the power and beauty of Caribbean culture
But it’s not just Barrington’s art on display. One shack houses work by Jamaican-born artist Paul Anthony Smith, in another a rope sculpture by Sonia Gomes hangs. In the back room, a film about Notting Hill Carnival by Akinola Davies Jr plays, its sound coming out of a beautiful soundsystem.
In a tradition you can trace back to other brilliant Caribbean diaspora artists like Denzil Forrester and Tam Joseph, Barrington uses colour, joy, movement and noise as a tool. Not to fight oppression or injustice, but as a tool of unification and celebration, of finding power in kinship and culture.
I love the joy, colour and feel of the show, but I just don’t think Barrington’s paintings themselves are that good. The wooden and iron constructs they’re stretched across are mainly distracting, and once you strip them away, the actual paintings are just a bit flat and not that interesting.
But there’s still a lot of great stuff to lose yourself in here. It’s sort of a painting show where the paintings aren’t the main attraction. Instead, this is Barrington raising up other artists, revelling in the power and beauty of Caribbean culture, celebrating, praising and exalting in how the past is a place that shapes you, and how nostalgia maybe isn’t such a bad thing after all.
