Questions for Alvaro NAME: Alvaro Barrington AGE: 34 WHERE DO YOU LIVE? Brooklyn What made you want to be an artist? a need and a want. I was doing other jobs but what i imagined myself as wasn’t what I was doing and that lead to depression and anxiety but mostly it was me wanting to see art that I want to see and knew i that only i could make it. What makes you happiest about making work? That moment where what I see is also what’s in front of me. The painting is not trying to be what I want it be but it’s what it needs to be. I think it’s like if you’re a musician and you need a vibe. You create something and there it is that vibe you needed. What was your earliest experience of art? i experienced a lot of different art growing up we had things like Panorama competitions where folks would play steel pan in bands, we had carnival etc, but one of my earliest memories of painting was a Rasta on my block in Flatbush Brooklyn where I grew up. he made these paintings of science fiction Caribbean landscapes. They were weird not too inventive but it was great. I use to talk to him about painting and once he gave me one his painting as gift but I don’t know what happened to it I was probably 7 or 8. Around 9-10 my cousin Fitzgerald and I started drawing comics book characters while we listened to the radio and then I started drawing birds and flowers giving them as gifts to family members on christmas. What does a day in studio usually look like for you? Usually it’s me trying to pin down through making ideas that I had about what a painting can be. But I get distracted a lot so a lot of time is spent listening to breakfast club interviews podcast like my friend Jessica Evan Lin and Cipha sounds they got a great podcast with comedians, old albums that I want to see how being my age has changed the meanings etc. but at my best I am looking and making. I tend to work on several different things at the same time to prevent eye fatigue. One a great day I’m bouncing between them all. You use everything from painting to textiles to photography to found images in your work; what is at the heart of the way these different elements connect? I look at a lot of art and want to be in conversation with so many artists and i think anything I experience I can be in conversation with it, it’s just a question of how do I do that responsibly to the materials, the medium, myself, the larger world etc. If I use a red it’s about how that red exist in front of me, in my imagination, next to another color, in society, culturally, in our expectations. It’s the same with a Polaroid camera of a string of Yarn. How would you describe the themes of your work? They are my interest so if I’m interested in something it’s figuring how to make an interesting work about it. Should art be beautiful? Yes because it needs to live in our soul. That sound cheesy but listen to Ghostface killa with Mary J bilge “All that I got is you” even though it’s about mass incarceration of young 13 year old black boys, about black American poverty about digging roaches out the cereal box before you eat it, it’s also about the soul about seeing the world through his mothers strength and weakness it’s about faith in the person who love and wronged you because we are humans. I grew up in hip hop culture in reggae, soca, black culture and that was always connected to the soul to beauty cause I think so much of the music comes out of the church. Listen to lil Wayne “how to Love” Jesus could have wrote that. Those are two of greatest songs of the last hundred years. its all about beauty. What do you think are the most important things happening in the art world today are? That the larger western art community is pushing against the narratives that opened spaces for only a specific group of makers. Today makers like Thornton Dail, Purvis Young, Betty Saar gets to be promoted outside of the community they made it. For years what prevented Saar from being taught in classes is that the larger art world’s imagination couldn’t see that she has little to nothing to do with Raschenberg. Both are genius but what Saar is doing requires a different looking tied to another tradition of making. Today folks imagination is allowing for and pushing other narratives that always existed. I am very excited about that because i’m a nerd and i like that i get to museums and figure out Piero della Francesca and Rose Wylie. The theme of the issue is about breaking the establishment. Discuss... “BURN BABYLON” that’s one of my favorite sayings and i have it in my artist statement which is a collections of quotes i love. As I get older I am becoming or maybe I’m realizing I’m a centrists who leans mostly left in my emotional imagination in that I think humanity needs to allow the voice and concerns of all marginalized communities to be respected and addressed. The “establishment” are those who can say I’m hurt and there is a structure to listen to that hurt. In many ways I’m part of the establishment cause of my passport, where i grew up, sex etc and some ways I’m not cause of my race, income etc. I think I don’t really care to break the establishment as more I am concerned with building new establishment that others can turn to and be seen heard taken care off. What does 2018 hold for you? Do you know yet? Does it excite you or scare you or both? Mostly it excites me, it starts with a show I have at Emalin gallery in London where I’ll have some new works along with two artists that I think are great Cristine Brache and Teresa Ferrell. Cristine is really great at finding the essential of two things and putting them into a sculpture that holds this tension where as Teresa is quite maximalist and can turn anything into a painting and throw anything at a painting the more she can throw at it and it still makes sense she will do that. I talk to both of them and they help me make better decisions in my art. In a way It’s a continuation of my PS1 MOMA show cause I also put them in that show too. The rest of 2018 is really going to be about looking making listening and participating in art. A lot questioning myself and my art.
