Sea Both Sides
Alvaro Barrington
MASSIMODECARLO is delighted to present Alvaro Barrington’s first personal exhibition in Italy: Sea Both Sides, on view at Casa Corbellini-Wassermann in Milan until December 6th, 2022.
Referencing both Jay-Z’s “I keep one eye open like CBS” and Frank Ocean’s “I see both sides like Chanel” Barrington’s Sea both Sides is a very personal take on this play on words: having moved to the United Kingdom, Barrington reflected on his experience in London, across the sea from New York City, and being able to see new, multiple sides of the United States from his new vantagepoint.
Sea Both Sides premieres Barrington’s first sculpture: NO Work on the Block, aka Gated Community, Milan, 2022, is a monumental structure that resolutely, imposingly inhabits the space that used to be Casa Corbellini-Wassermann’s central living room. Its volume, chain and metal structure is as intimidating as it draws the viewer towards it. All gravitating around this central sculpture, the gallery’s adjacent rooms feature four woven works and ten new concrete portraits, their muted gazes directed towards its spellbinding, haunting presence.
NO Work on the Block, aka Gated Community, Milan, 2022 is the fruit of Barrington’s exploration of sculpture as a medium. In New York, the “block” is a cornerstone of the city’s layout: imposing, monolithic, the block’s structure dwarfs anyone meandering among them, making the sky feel small and far removed above. Barrington translates this energy, and the sensation of being locked within the narrow city blocks and gazing up at the sky into this powerful, yet inaccessible structure.
Thoroughly mindful of the context within which he presents his work, Barrington was especially intrigued by Casa Corbellini-Wassermann’s interior architecture, and particularly by the marble frames that structure the home’s doors, floors and windows.
As a response to this, the works in Sea Both Sides are framed in materials ranging from metal to cardboard and mirrors thus create a new dialogue with the home’s turn of the Century architecture. Indeed Barrington sees cardboard as a “new marble”: it is the epitome of our contemporary reality, at once reminiscent of “arte povera”, as much as a ubiquitous reminder of our online Amazon delivery age.
The cement portraits in Sea Both Sides find their starting point in Barrington’s study of Picasso’s work, which was profoundly impacted by the Spanish flu and World War Two, and resulted in his figurative paintings representing heavy, corpulent female bodies modeled after sculptures. It quickly became clear to Barrington that almost one century apart, similarly harrowing experiences are influencing his own practice, with war and the pandemic still looming, but also the silent pandemic of the opiod crisis that is plaguing our contemporary societies.
Rather than paint sculptures himself, Barrington chose to paint with cement, translating this same heaviness directly onto the soft, textile surface of his velvet carpet canvases. His application of cement to outline each figure’s silhouette is swift and gestural, creating an elegant balance between their structures complex, long construction and the painting’s spontaneous, gestural process.
Finally, Sea Both Sides presents four medium-sized woven works, entirely woven by Barrington at the gallery in the days leading up to the exhibition. Composed with colorful wool yarns crisscrossing vertically and horizontally across the delicate, almost transparent surface of the raw jute canvas, these works are uniquely compact and loose at once, presenting an exquisite connection between the home’s mille righe – thousand lines linear marble features, the lines and blocks of New York City, and a humble nod to the notion of manual labour that is central to Barrington’s practice.
Artist
阿尔瓦罗-巴林顿出生于委内瑞拉(1983 年,加拉加斯),父母分别是海地人和格林纳达人,他在加勒比海和纽约布鲁克林长大。他目前在伦敦生活和工作。他的艺术实践涉及多个领域,反映了文化生产及其交流的历史。虽然他首先认为自己是一名画家,但他的图像制作过程却非常广泛,因为他的作品包括各种非传统材料的应用--如混凝土、木材、纺织品、纱线、麻布、纸板、服装以及明信片、版画、素描和摄影。对艺术家来说,每种媒体都有无数的可能性,每种媒体都是表现个人和集体文化叙事的工具。经常出现的主题是脸部特写、身体部位和赤道植物。他的作品借鉴了木槿花、20 世纪哈莱姆文艺复兴、马库斯-加维、图帕克等 90 年代嘻哈文化等意象,并从威廉-德库宁、约瑟夫-博伊斯和罗伯特-劳申伯格等其他艺术家的创作实践中汲取灵感。他的作品探索各种主题,如移民、国籍、自我身份、性、时间和数字领域。巴林顿还积极参与慈善机构、音乐会、表演和演出等各种社区活动。巴林顿认为,艺术需要在公共场所向社区开放,因此自 2019 年以来,他一直参与诺丁山狂欢节的组织工作。2022 年,他担任了诺丁山狂欢节主音乐会舞台 "加勒比女王 "的制作人。
巴林顿是 2024 年泰特不列颠美术馆委员会选定的艺术家。