Alvaro Barrington in conversation with Alex Bacon On stealing from the past and painting within the space
By Alex Bacon
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 (The Brooklyn 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.
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