Alvaro Barrington and Dean Cross: Landscape Is Country
In partnership with Cement Fondu
Alvaro Barrington and Dean Cross, Things that are real exhibition launch, Cement Fondu, Sydney (3 June 2023). Courtesy Cement Fondu. Photo: Isabella Moore.
Alvaro Barrington and Dean Cross, Things that are real exhibition launch, Cement Fondu, Sydney (3 June 2023). Courtesy Cement Fondu. Photo: Isabella Moore.
Australian artist Dean Cross and U.K.-based Alvaro Barrington interrogate the processes of art making and ideas of place, landscape and Country in a suite of collaborative and individual works at Sydney gallery Cement Fondu.
Things that are real (3 June–23 July 2023) is Cement Fondu's fifth annual pairing of a trailblazing local artist with a celebrated international artist and is the result of a conversation between Cross and Barrington that began long before their recent real-life meeting. The exhibition includes two series produced through exchange and cooperation, as well each artist's individual explorations.
The exhibition begins on the stairwell to the first-floor gallery with Cross' ostensibly abstract painting Untitled (2022) and its text declaration 'Landscape Painting in the 21st Century'. It's an apt entry point to an exhibition that asks what it means to be a painter now and to challenge art historical definitions of painting and its genres.
For the series 'Postcards 1-9' (2023), presented in an upstairs atrium, Barrington sent drawings on banana-leaf paper to Cross for him to layer his contributions over. Cross' addition of personal snapshots and drawn and painted elements lends these works a nostalgic, ephemeral dimension, evoking the disruption of distance but also reinforcing human connections. For another cooperative series of six works, each titled after the depicted plant, Cross uses oil stick on paper to illustrate the invasive species of plants growing near his studio in regional New South Wales, including agapanthus, blackberry, and wild mustard, with Barrington adding painted blue borders on his arrival.
Josephine Skinner, co-founding director and lead curator of Cement Fondu, says 'this pairing has taken form less as a collaboration and more as a layering and assemblage of two artists' practices—a relationship and exchange that, I would suggest, mirrors the methodology of assemblage often utilised within their individual practices.'
Several individual works by Cross and Barrington also speak to each other through this mode of assemblage and in the motif of a wave form that repeats across Barrington's mark making for the Postcard works and two large striking paintings on burlap, his Sea to C: Sydney june (2023) and Sydney june victoria sunset (2023), which Barrington painted on his arrival in Sydney several days before the opening of the exhibition. Orange waves of light also vibrate through Cross' I tried to tell you how i feel but you didn't listen (2023) and the untitled 'Landscape Painting in the 21st Century' painting.
Skinner notes that the artists use non-traditional materials such as weed matting and the ubiquitous plastic checked shopping bag, alongside motifs, ideas, cultural references, and personal, social, and art histories to layer meaning and to question ideas of traditional, often western, ways of making.
Dean Cross is a Worimi man, born and raised on Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country in the Canberra region of the Australian Capital Territory. He describes himself as a paratactical artist and enacts First Nations sovereignty through expanded contemporary art methodologies. Most recently his work has been presented at Primavera, MCA, Sydney (2021), the 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, and in solo exhibitions at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery (2021) and Carriageworks (2021–2022). He is represented by STATION gallery, Sydney/Melbourne.
A commitment to personal heritage and community also informs the work of Alvaro Barrington, who was born in Venezuela to Grenadian and Haitian parents and raised between the Caribbean and Brooklyn, New York, by a network of relatives. Barrington's first solo exhibition was held at MoMA PS1, New York, in 2017, and recent major exhibitions include a critically acclaimed solo show at South London Gallery (2021) and the group show Mixing It Up: Painting Today at Hayward Gallery, London (2021).
Alvaro Barrington is represented by Thaddaeus Ropac, Blum & Poe, Emalin, Sadie Coles HQ, Karma, Anton Kern Gallery, Nicola Vassell Gallery, and Saint George Projects. His practice expands to encompass collaborations across music, fashion, philanthropy, contributions to the Notting Hill Carnival in London, and a stage at Glastonbury Festival in 2023.
The following conversation between Josephine Skinner, Dean Cross, and Alvaro Barrington took place at the opening of Things that are Real at Cement Fondu in June 2023.
JSI want to discuss this collaboration, how that has played out for you both, and how that might give us ways to think about what collaboration is. Dean, why did Alvaro stand out to you as an artist you'd like to connect with?
DCI remember seeing a detail in one of Alvaro's paintings—a post-it note—and I thought to myself, that's something I might do, which was exciting for me, and from then I followed [Alvaro's] work. Bruce Nauman was also on the list; all sorts of great people were. But as the project revealed itself, it made more sense to work with Alvaro for this exhibition.
JSAlvaro, what about the idea of this project piqued your interest? How did you approach this pairing with Dean?
ABI think Bruce Nauman is a great idea. He's my dream collab, too... You get these invitations and some just make sense. If I had to trace back why it makes sense, one of my favourite moments growing up as a kid in Brooklyn was seeing the rapper Biggie Smalls. There is this iconic photograph of him that I try to paint all the time. He is wearing Versace glasses—Versace had this idea of the Italian Baroque, right? But then he is also wearing a Congo hat and a COOGI sweater.
What's interesting about the COOGI sweater is that it's not a colour palette that you would find used by any European; it has a very specific First Nations feel to it. I had no idea about the relationship to First Nations, but it was interesting because Australia in that moment, in the 90s, was considered aspirational, at least in my community, just as Italy was considered aspirational. I felt very fortunate to get the invite because it tapped into a part of my identity that I've been trying to unpack as an adult. It's been amazing being here and getting deeper into the grounds of that.
JSBefore you both met in person, you worked collaboratively on the series 'Postcards 1-9', with Alvaro doing the first layer of sketching on paper, and this was then sent to Dean, and Dean worked on top of them.
Remaining in that moment before you met in person, Dean, when you received this mark making from Alvaro there were no expectations, there was no real context. What was that like? And, Alvaro, how did that outcome hit you?
DCInitially, the plan was to spend some time together. I was going to travel and spend some time [in the U.K.], but that didn't pan out. So, we had a brief conversation and discussed what we could do. That was when the decision was made for a trade. I didn't think much about it until the [drawings] turned up, because I had no way to know what was coming. It could have been anything, which was very exciting, and when they did arrive it occurred to me that they were a kind of transnational communication.
Another word for that is a postcard. Postcards are a beautiful and effective medium that have been refined over a long time. There's a field of image and text, often multiple images on a very small plane, and then space to write a few words that can sum up a lot, often the sentiment 'I miss you'. How beautiful. That was all I really needed to know what to do next.
JSAnd what did you draw on top?
DCVarious bits and pieces. I went into my archive and pulled out bits and bobs. There's stuff from other projects, from deeper personal sketchbooks, things I bought on eBay, and everything in between. I was thinking more broadly about the show and how the collaboration would come together as a palimpsest, more than anything else, where we were not working together, but working on top of each other and building layers.
JSAlvaro, did you have any expectations for what the works might look like? How did the actual works compare to what you had imagined?
ABI didn't really have an image of what the work would look like. Obviously, through Instagram and other media I was able to see what Dean makes as an artist. He uses this language that gets called assemblage because of a certain politics in America. But it's really a language that many cultures all over the world use, of basically putting things together. But when I saw Dean's work, I knew that there were nuances in the work that were impossible for me to truly understand unless I was here. I think especially being an American you can say, I know what that is, and be dismissive even though it's coming from a completely different source.
In positioning painting as having a specific set of rules to be applied, people grow into this thinking that only a specific group of people are geniuses in the creation of this thing.
I knew that thinking was even more real when I saw Dean's work, these black oil-stick [drawings]. Immediately they reminded me of a particular way of making in America that comes out of action painting or Pop art. But it also reminded me of charcoal drawings, which, if you go back ten or fifteen thousand years, people all over the world were doing; they realised that burned pieces of wood become charcoal and there's this surface and they could paint what's outside their window or in their view. So, there was obviously another sort of reference point that Dean was talking to and, having never been to Australia, I knew there was no way for me to access it until I came here. And when I did, it made much more sense to me.
JSI want to talk about landscape painting. There's a painting by Dean mounted on the right-hand side of the gallery stairwell that is inscribed 'Landscape Painting in the 21st Century'. That serves in multiple ways. It could be a helpful framework for encountering the exhibition or a provocation and a red herring because there are numerous art historical genres referenced in this exhibition, among many other things.
Dean, I would love you to speak about how you were thinking about landscape painting in relation to this show. And then, Alvaro, as a visitor to Sydney and someone who has a background of migrating between the Caribbean and New York, but also traveling globally and now living in the U.K., what does landscape painting mean for you within that personal framework, and what it was like to respond to this provocation from Dean?
DCI think about painting a lot. I love Painting, as in capital 'P' Painting, not as a verb but as a noun. Like a lot of colonial places, painting has a history here that has its challenges. That's one part of my thinking, about the rich resource there to work with and from, and I like the challenge.
Today I was looking at this beautiful, quite small Arthur Streeton painting. The scene really looks like where I live on Walbunja Country, in Braidwood, and I was quite moved, being a bit homesick. All the problems with this kind of colonial or early painting in Australia evaporate, and I can still be moved by this little bit of oil paint on canvas. I live in a farming community and you can really see the impact of a settler instinct, but at the same time you can be in forests, some of which were burnt in the 2019–2020 fires, that have been maintained since Gondwana.
At a practical level, what is a landscape painting showing in the 21st century? How do we do this? And can it be done?
Also, I half-jokingly say that working in the landscape is also working in portraiture for me; there is no distinction or separation there. I'm not separate from my landscape. At a practical level, what is a landscape painting showing in the 21st century? How do we do this? And can it be done? Of course, the obvious answer is yes, but it's still a fun journey to go on.
JSAlvaro, how did you feel responding to the space that Dean's head was at in terms of landscape, and this pairing being read as a landscape painting show?
ABI think this comes from our lived experiences. The way Dean approaches landscape, at least how I got it, is that it's all encompassing. It's something that he addresses both internally in his body and in the capabilities of his body, to be able to move left to right, up, down. You see that play out in certain gestures in the works; you can trace how he's moving. But then there's also the idea that landscape can be a bedroom or a zoo. It really is an all-encompassing mind space that was interesting for me to think through.
Landscape ... becomes a site of trade and distribution rich with exchange.
As a descendant of constant migration, I'm still thinking through it. My first recorded family member moved from St Andrews, Scotland, to St Andrews, Grenada, where he met my great-great-grandma who was a descendant of folks from Africa, and so on. So, there's been a long history of migration and trade. And one of the ways in which I look at landscape—and it plays out in all three of my works here and in our collaborative works—is that it becomes a site of trade and distribution rich with exchange, and exchange not only with nature but mostly an exchange of ideas, an exchange of how you're engaging with a certain community and how those things transfer. That's generally how I tend to look at landscape, as a site of a kind of exchange.
JSAlvaro, a few of your works here—Sea to C: sydney june and Sydney june Victoria sunset in the main gallery and the mark making on the banana paper upstairs for the Postcard series—feature wave forms. It strikes me that you are being drawn, in terms of landscape and the natural world, to water motifs, whereas, Dean, your work, at least in this show, feels much more grounded in the soil, in the immediate land around you.
DCI'd say that's fair. When I left Sydney, I didn't expect it to have the impact that it did. I was able to see more. When I use the word 'landscape', I actually mean Country, and when you see something like this show, for example, it's easy to forget in this gallery in Sydney that it's still Country. And so, I like to try to use these strategies that have been imported to help articulate what Country might mean to us.
I've found it quite striking that Alvaro having been here three days and dealing with the work has been straight on the money. I found that very interesting. Coming from the outside, it's easy to see Country, yet people who have grown up here don't get it. So, when I'm using the words 'landscape' and 'landscape painting', I like that you referred to it as a 'red herring'—that's probably closer to the truth. Things aren't always what they seem.
JSLet's talk about materials. One of the synergies that I see between your practices is the way that you both draw on materials, not just because of their function, but because of the stories and narratives those materials hold. Alvaro, why do you avoid using the binary language of traditional and non-traditional materials?
ABI guess it depends on where you start 'traditional' from and what's the zone of reference.
JSI'm coming from the idea of traditional art materials you might find in an art store that are purpose-made with the expectation that they will end up on a canvas or they will create a certain type of mark. You both utilise these, but you also bring into your work materials that have broader functions in society and hold with them multiple meanings that you enlist and engage by bringing them into your work.
For example, Alvaro, in Banana X sydney (2023) you've used the checked plastic bags often used to carry belongings as a surface for the work; bags that I've certainly come across in different places around the world. You've also painted on burlap canvas, and that's something that I know that you often return to in your practice. The substrate behind the two works on this wall is weed matting that Dean has brought in, normally used as a material for controlling weeds. I'm interested to hear your thoughts on the relationship between surface and the motifs and the mark making on top, and your thoughts on why surface isn't a neutral space.
ABTo me they're all signifiers. In terms of the traditional and someone using cotton or linen, I think often people use traditional materials because at art school you meet someone who asks if you paint on cotton or linen and use acrylic or oil. I found that question very uninteresting and that meant there was a challenge for me to make interesting paintings. It's not that I don't use cotton or linen, but rather I don't find it necessarily true that a set of rules set up 400 years ago can be described as a neutral way of making work.
It's very specific to a group of individuals who with incredible innovation made paintings a certain type of way. But the history of painting is any surface; any surface that's in front of you is available to make paintings. And some of the most brilliant painting—most of the history of painting—is not on cotton. It's interesting how education means a kind of limitation of one's imagination. I find that problematic.
DCI agree. I'm a proud Duchampian; I think things are real and have real material qualities and memories and associations, and those are all tools you can use in your work. For me, that also comes from a long history in dance where your body operates in certain way and you have to generate meaning. That's a whole other conversation, about the limitations of the body to generate meaning.
But the weed matting, for example, started as an idea that failed. It's a rich material and you don't have to think too hard about why weed matting might be appropriate. But now, when its function is changed, it's much sexier—is the word I first used—it's quite luxurious, surprisingly, as a wallpaper. But it probably has other associations in other kinds of communities.
ABI also want to add, and this is something that has played out in this relationship, that how we frame things can often determine who's allowed in and who isn't allowed in, right? And so, if we start with a simple idea of painting being cotton, oil paint, or acrylic, where does that leave Chinese artists who have been making some of the most brilliant paintings for hundreds of years, or some of the First Nations folks here?
In positioning painting as having a specific set of rules to be applied, people grow into this thinking that only a specific group of people are geniuses in the creation of this thing. And this becomes extremely problematic in terms of who gets to be looked at and who doesn't get to be looked at. —[O]
