The Brooklyn Rail

Alvaro Barrington recently welcomed me to his sprawling studio complex in London’s Whitechapel neighborhood. Fresh from the opening of his installation at Tate Britain, his most ambitious to date, we discussed a wide range of subjects, including his grounding in painting, his study of art history, and the inspiration he draws from hip hop culture. This allowed us to pull out some of the many threads present in the Tate project, both personal—such as his evocation of significant female friends and family—and formal, as in his particular approach to the structure of Tate’s Duveen hallway.

Alex Bacon (Rail): Before visiting the installation at Tate Britain, the exhibitions I’d seen of your work were painting oriented. It was very different to see your ideas on the scale present at Tate.

Alvaro Barrington: As a painter who feels most at home with a canvas, brush, and paint, it was a crazy leap for me emotionally, because I knew that I didn’t want to do an exhibition where I put paintings on a wall. So I had to really reimagine how painting existed in the space.

Rail: So painting was still structuring what you were doing?

Barrington: Yes. But I had to reimagine it as not being the centerpiece, but as somehow being an accessory. Like this sofa is a painting for me. This sofa is a frame for the painting.. It’s pulling apart the idea of how my grandma covered the furniture in her house with plastic. It was her way of saying, when my mom came to visit, “you have a home here,” and wanting to protect it, so that my mom could walk into a place and be like, “Wow, this is still like it never changed.” So I wanted to look at the plastic as a form of protection—the idea of, well, okay, my grandma took me in, and what was it that she was protecting? My mom was a teenager. So she’s protecting a kid from raising another kid. But she was also protecting my future. Because if I was growing up with just my mom, then I would have felt the burden of having been a financial responsibility on my mother, who would have been struggling to put food on the table.

Rail: So you wanted to summon the experience of this memory and allow the Tate’s visitors to experience some of that feeling of protection for themselves?

Barrington: Exactly. But still grounding it in painting, which is my safe zone. It’s how I rescue things. I was exploring how I could make my own sofa. I’m a fan of these two hair braiders, Taiba Akhuetie and Shamara Roper. I remembered my grandma coming home and my mom braiding my grandma’s hair, and how intimate that was, so on the front is a braiding from Taiba for this one, then we added some by Shamara as well.

Rail: The plastic coverings of some of the sofas in the Tate contain drawings, which is another collaboration since one of your friends, Teresa Farrell, produced those drawings. There are also sofas with plastic containing postcards with woven elements. So different things have found their way into these frames, as you call them.

Barrington: Yes. I’ve been obsessed with Gee’s Bend quilts for a very long time, and wanted to make a Gee’s Bend quilt of my own. I’ve been trying to figure it out for fifteen years. So those sofas became my version of a Gee’s Bend quilt. But it also was the case where I thought things like, “I’m a huge fan of Teresa, and we collaborate all the time,” so I asked her to put some work in there.

Doing a show at the Tate Britain I was also looking at certain British artists, and Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995) was really inspiring for me. Because it’s about something so personal, and that was a North Star for me. The Tate show had to be personal, but it also had to be universal. I thought the form of the tent was so special: really smart and really generous. It was super intimate. But it also played with the idea of sleeping with people, as it’s not only about sex, but about how people can live in your imagination. What this work is really about is intimacy.

Rail: The Tate show highlights different points in time, and has a tripartite structure organized around three women in your life. Two of these deal with your origins, by focusing on your mother and grandmother. The third is a friend, someone very much in the present, and who is represented by an ebullient, larger-than-life statue that centers the whole project in a way, both metaphorically and physically.

It’s nice that, as a visitor, you travel through time: from one to two poles of your youth—that spent in Grenada, and that in New York City—while the center of the installation evokes the Notting Hill Carnival, which references your current life living in London. So as viewers we pass from past to present and back again as we walk back and forth through the installation.

Barrington: Yes. The Duveen Hall is like a long spine. It’s a hallway. Whenever I see a long hallway, I always think of a journey. I really wanted to look at the architecture of the spaces, and think about how to engage with what the architecture was allowing me to do. The rotunda made me very aware that I needed to have something that you had to walk around. So that’s when the idea of Samantha came about for the central rotunda. I was in Florence and I saw Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, and that sparked this idea.

The rotunda area made me think I could have this sculpture that you have to walk around. Whereas in the south Duveen, where you’re coming up the stairs from the river, you would hear the rain, possibly. So maybe, before you go see the rest of the exhibition, or the rest of the museum, you could rest for a few minutes on the sofas. In the north Duveen, they have these arches. And I just thought it’d be a really wonderful reason to get away with doing stained glass. And so each one was just like a way of saying, let me figure out how to engage with the architecture, as opposed to, here’s my sculpture in a space.

Rail: Even thinking about your paintings, this idea of the frame has always been very important to you, because often you don’t just paint a canvas and put it on the wall. The frame becomes its own element. It has its own design and formal composition. So I’m curious, how did you start thinking about the frame and wanting to pay attention to it as its own thing, and not just an incidental border?

Barrington: It was something I paid attention to and became aware of when I came to Europe and went to see the Piero della Francesca frescoes in the Cappella Maggiore in Arezzo, and saw the frame. The work’s quality of stillness wouldn’t have happened if the frame wasn’t around it. When the Tate opportunity came, it was a way to figure out how to get into installation: if I’m a painter, how do I think about installation as basically a way of framing.

Rail: So you were thinking of each part of the Duveen hallway as frames to populate with images? Composing them like a painting, but using, as you said, three-dimensional objects and placing them? How did you think about where things would go and what you would put where?

Barrington: I went to a lot of churches in Rome, Florence, and Venice.

Rail: So you went way back in art history, thinking about how artists in the past have dealt with architectural space?

Barrington: And how they deal with furniture, for example. There’s a thousand ways that if I was painting it, I would have a whole history to look at. I had to think about how somebody’s going to sit on the chair, and that meant the painting had to be a frame for the chair, as opposed to the painting being the chair. Like with Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965)—is it conceptual? There’s so many ways of dealing with it.

Rail: Do you often have certain ideas about a space, or about a body of work, and then that leads you to do certain research into art history, or into design, or architecture?

Barrington: Yes. One of the first shows that I did was called Artists I Steal From, at Thaddaeus Ropac, London, because I get so excited about learning. History has so many answers. If I need to make a certain gesture, well, maybe Velazquez figured that out four hundred years ago.

Rail: From what you’ve been saying it sounds like, in working through an idea, you’re as likely to look at Botticelli as listen to the Notorious B.I.G. Your approach to research is very eclectic. It’s not just about, “okay, I’m making a painting. So I look at other paintings that look like that.” Do you think a lot of your work has a problem-solving approach? Do you approach a show or a work as a series of problems to be solved?

Barrington: There’s a lot of ways to think about it. One of the things that I wanted to do is make my first ten years my Picasso Blue and Pink period. That was Picasso looking at the world as an immigrant, who moved from Spain to Paris, where he lived around a lot of working class people. The woman with one eye, or the guitar player, for example. So it’s a lot of poverty, and I grew up in poverty, so I thought, “okay, well—if I was to make my Blue and Pink period—what would that look like in an innovative way, for 2024. What stories would I want to tell?”

My first show with Sadie Coles in 2019 was called Sex Love Nurturing Famalay. That’s basically the first part of the Duveen. Making it, I was thinking about something Arthur Jafa talks about all time, which is how Blackness is basically for public consumption. And if you’re going to consume, or enjoy, then consume everything. Consume our pain, consume our joy, take it all in. And although I’m Black, I’m also consuming all of that. I’m consuming our joy. I’m consuming our porn. I’m consuming everything. So I thought I should have a practice that explores all of that. I look at Tupac, and not only is he doing “Keep Ya Head Up,” but he’s also doing videos with porn stars. I want an art practice that explores everything.

Rail: So you try to tell a story with each exhibition? When you start planning do you think, what is the story I want to tell? And then do you make the work through the framework of a particular story?

Barrington: Yes. I mostly said yes to a particular exhibition because I thought “oh, this place could be where that story could make sense.” If I look at my ten year exhibition history there will be the hit songs, but there will also be the weird B-sides. But it will all be a complete painting. Tupac made something like over one thousand songs before he passed away, and some were bangers, and some were like, ohhh, I can see he needed to make that song, but it probably wasn’t that great. I just thought, “could I give myself that freedom as an artist?”

Rail: So are you more concerned with exploring through making rather than hyper-editing yourself and trying to only release only the “hits,” so to speak? It seems like you’re saying that you’re happy to produce a lot of ideas and then, over time, looking back one can see that some are more important than others. Maybe it’s not important that every painting be the best.

Barrington: Yeah, I don’t even really know what “the best” means. But I edit a lot actually, because I make so much.

Rail: You’ve said that you feel most at home painting. That also made me think that, maybe for you, it’s also that there’s a physical, or psychological, or cathartic element to making. As well as, or even beyond, the conceptual framework of what would be in a show. The physical act of making also has its own role. Then you’re describing a certain editing process. So maybe there are multiple editing processes, where the first is just to make, and that comes from some visceral, personal space, and then you start to say, “okay, we don’t need all of that.” And maybe then a show is a further editing down?

Barrington: As an artist I think it’s really important to remove morality from it and just try to think, “what is honest?” If you’re looking at a Caravaggio, or a great old master painting of a baptism, the morality reading would be that Christianity has been a violent scourge on Earth. But another reading would be to think about who was probably looking at this baptism in Rome in the 1600s, who is probably a twenty-two year old person who has maybe already had three miscarriages, and knows that their lifespan is to maybe forty-five, and is in a desperate condition. Somehow this has so much meaning for them. I think we have come to the space where art criticism says, “Christianity is bad. Therefore, this painting is bad.” The contemporary critic doesn’t always see what the painting is serving to its viewer.

Rail: In your show Artists I Steal From, I imagine you selected works that contained things you wanted to take from them? I imagine it wasn't the greatest hits, like “art I love,” but it was maybe more things that have been useful to you.

Barrington: Yeah, exactly. Stealing as opposed to borrowing. When you steal something, you don’t want to get caught. If you stole that car, you don’t want people looking thinking that car doesn’t belong to you. You gotta make it your car after that. So the idea of stealing was that I learned from these artists how to become more me, because I think oftentimes we get confused.

If we look at how Picasso functioned, what he did in his paintings, he was innovating on something. He saw an African mask, or he saw Islamic color palettes, because he’s in the south of France, and Islam had taken over that region, and he internalized that, and something completely different came out in his canvas. To me that’s very different from Modigliani, for example, who is a horrible appropriator—it’s just one-to-one. There’s no innovation. He just drew an African mask on a body. Versus Picasso, who was trying to invent a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking about something.

I guess for me, with appropriation there’s no real translation, there’s no internalization. The art comes in when you take this thing and make it something completely different. I took it in a direction that I didn’t see coming. I was listening to Method Man talk about how he took the way Jon Bon Jovi had sung a certain melody to make his stage name, “Method Man.” Or Snoop Dogg heard Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story,” but by the time Snoop rapped about it, it’s Snoop, it’s not Slick Rick.

Rail: There’s still so much concern with ideas of originality. Obviously, all the options have long since been exhausted. So it seems like a much more realistic idea to think, “okay, if we’re inevitably going to be taking from some tradition or some other thing, how does it become something different through that person taking it up?” Maybe that’s originality in our time: the way that you acknowledge, “I’m taking from whatever, but then I know that when I put it out, it becomes something different because it’s made by me, through my voice and my experience.” This seems like a much more realistic and dynamic way of imagining working with other ideas and histories.

Barrington: Yeah, it feels much more real to our time. We’re in the information age, where everybody can get any information in five seconds. But we’re also in an age where crediting cultures is super important. It’s really important to say, “I got this from this, and thought about this.” And it’s much more interesting, because you’re saying, “I spent time with that art and it helps me understand that culture a little bit more.”

Rail: So it’s an act of reverence as well? In a way you’re reenacting, and in doing so learning about where that idea or thing came from. In taking it, it’s not just an empty neutral gesture, you’re wanting to embody that experience, whether it’s going to Florence and seeing a chapel, or dealing with a hip hop song. Is that what you think about when you, for example, put your art on a float in the Notting Hill Carnival? You’re showing it in this non-art space to a different, non-art audience.

Barrington: Yeah, hopefully, hopefully. That’s what makes it more interesting for me. It’s how I became interested in art. I grew up with rappers, where before you became interesting globally, or nationally, you’d have to represent your neighborhood. Which means, if you’re Jay-Z, or Busta Rhymes, or Biggie, you have to be freestyling in your lunch room every day, then go to the corner of a random neighborhood and rap to prove that you’re the best.