Grace Across The World:Alvaro Barrington's Grace @ Tate Britain.

"Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now I'm found, was blind but now I see" - Amazing Grace

Back in October 2021 I visited a confusing, yet aesthetically pleasing, Alvaro Barrington exhibition at the South London Gallery between Camberwell and Peckham. Barrington's stock has risen and he's now exhibiting at Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries with a commission named Grace. One I'd hoped would be equally aesthetically pleasing and, hopefully, a little less confusing.

 

It succeeded on the first metric but I'm not sure it entirely did on the second one. There's an information board as you enter that tells you what the Grenadian artist (though one born in Venezuela, who grew up in New York, and now lives and works in London - cosmopolitan) is aiming to do and what his art is about but, to be honest, it was difficult - in most instances - to really relate the explanations to the art itself.

I guess that's how it goes with art. Barrington starts by talking about his love of Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals and how Rothko gave those paintings to the Tate because he had a deep admiration for JMW Turner and wanted his works to be hung alongside the pioneering British artist's. Barrington, for his part, wants to see his work alongside, or at least near, both the Rothkos and the Turners. In a conversation if you like.

Or, if you'd prefer, a kind of song. A song like Amazing Grace for which the exhibition is named. A song about how acts of grace can, either by (a non-existent) God or by actual real humans, give humanity hope. Barrington seems particularly enamoured with a performance that Aretha Franklin gave for Barack Obama and goes on to speak about how the song itself was written by the British clergyman and repentant former slave ship captain John Newton.

Without making any further comment about slavery. Reading between the lines, it seems Barrington sees this installation as his own act of grace. A thankyou to the women in his life, his sister, his mother, and his grandmother, and to the wider British Caribbean Community.

It's broken up into three parts (Frederica:Embodying, Samantha:Depicting, Emelda:Evoking) all named after those three vitally important women in his life. Frederica:Embodying is Barrington's thankyou to the grandmother who helped his young mother bring him up. They lived in a shack in the West Indian countryside with a corrugated tin roof and furniture covered in plastic so that it would remain the same for family members when they returned, giving them a sense of security and constancy.

It's a neat move that Barrington has replicated the corrugated tin roof, complete with the sound of raindrops pitter-pattering on to it, and he's also remade the covered furniture (or at least a likeness) which visitors can enjoy, and were enjoying, sitting on as they visit. The presence of other visitors sat on the art, however, made it hard to look at some of the other actual artworks he'd placed over these sofas and settees.

The centrepiece of the installation relates to Barrington's sister, Samantha, and how the two siblings would always find a way to participate in Notting Hill Carnival. Samantha would dance in 'bikini' mas and Alvaro Barrington would simply enjoy the spectacle of hundreds (actually tens of thousands) of people expressing themselves.

To represent that part of his/their life he's made a huge statue and surrounded it with lots of colourful paintings of people dressed as if for carnival. Though some of them look positively demonic and some of the illustrations are far more abstract. One of them looks a bit like the cover of New Order's 1989 single Fine Time. Elsewhere I'm reminded of flowers, bees, expressionist daubs, and, as intended, sunny afternoons in West London dancing to calypso, soca, and reggae.

For me, it's the best part of the installation. The third, and final, part is the most confusing. Barrington talks of his mother moving from Venezuela to New York for work and taking on, eventually - when he was eight years old, the responsibility of caring for him. He reminds us that that was at a time when the black community in America was under relentless attack from the lack of economic opportunity, cocaine, mass incarceration, and violence.

When even a trip to the local grocery store was fraught with danger. To represent this he's mocked up a kind of space age looking grocery store whose shutters go up and down constantly as if to protect itself against the outside world and the violence and danger it contains. It was work I felt might have worked better in situ and suffered from being in the comparatively sterile gallery environment but it's an interesting idea. One of many that Alvaro Barrington clearly has. Hopefully, as time goes by, I'll start to understand them a bit better rather than simply enjoying them.