John Walker’s recent paintings prove that confronting the past can be rewarding. By virtue of scope alone, Walker’s new work makes a lot of contemporary painting look thin and tinny, materially as well as conceptually.
In this show, Walker pays his dues to the Old Masters, principally to Goya and Velázquez. He is declaring sources and influences that he’s carried with him for a number of years. It is difficult not to make too much of this. The coupling of the names of great artists from the past with that of a contemporary painter can seem as much like bad art history as good public relations.
Walker has recently changed his medium, from canvas-collage and adulterated acrylics (which at times looked like surrogates for oil paint) to oil, wax and alkyd resins. The effect of the materials an artist uses can be crucial to style—even to the kind of space that can be painted—and here the effect of the transition is pronounced. Dammit, these look old: sfumato darks; deep, bituminous glazes; old master glooms; roughterrained impastos; scumbling and clotted-cream highlights. Walker runs the gamut of grand effects, and renders them with a harsh frankness. One imagines small boys grinding pigments in dusty, north-lit studios, and secret paint recipes concocted in the dark.
One group of paintings, titled “Labyrinth,” take their compositional order from Velazquez’ Las Meniñas, peopled not with the original figures, dogs and studio paraphernalia, but with hybrid forms derived from earlier Walker paintings. Walker’s Balcony paintings of a couple of years ago did much the same thing, but used Manet as a source. Those were like costume dramas—like Shakespeare in modern dress, in which the sailors from The Tempest are like The Village People, Caliban like a Black Panther, with Timothy Leary as Prospero. With “Labyrinth,” Walker attempts very grand, almost baroque painting. They hover between Velazquez and the present. They are extraordinary, aggrandized puppet theaters, absurdly operatic. I keep thinking of Dickens’ Miss Haversham sitting in the dark. If the paintings seem to miss, it is because they overreach—which is still better than underachievement.
Aside from “Labyrinth” pieces, the show was dominated by paintings containing single figures set in austere surroundings (like characters in a Beckett play). The austerity of these paintings makes one concentrate on color and handling, the former more adventurous than we have until now expected of Walker, the latter as assured as ever. The figure usually stands in a blank space, intersected by a shallow horizon line and a vertical—the edge of a door or the edge of a painting (as on the left of Las Meniñas). Like Goya, too, the palette in each painting is limited—grays, earths, silvery blues and greens, in broad swift strokes and swatches. Walker even picks up Goya’s use of outline, delineating forms with black, drawn thinly with a brush, or laid on straight from the tube, then rubbed. The figures are limbless, or headless, barely figures at all. In the “Conservatory” paintings, for instance, the figure is like an unbuttoned greatcoat, uninhabited, alone. It is similar to the coat worn by Francisco Bayeu in Goya’s portrait—as sober, as heavy as the expression on Bayeu’s face. There’s a painting which looks like Napoleon’s hat resting on a beach. The quirkiness of some of these shapes is often humorous (like the snouty triangle in The Shape and the Disgruntled Oxford Professor). The “Alba” paintings again refer to Goya. Walker’s Red Sash Alba is a pinch-waisted hourglass, a red, raw figure, all sash. In Daintree II (some paintings are named after Oxford Dons) there’s a marvelous piece of drapery. The show (which was shown in two parts because of the size of the gallery) may have been uneven (there were a couple of mavericks—an untitled work from ’79, and Tullamarine,—previously described by Matthew Collings as a “tough version” of a Jake Berthot) but that was half the fun—the exhibition encouraged one to wander. All too often, it’s once round and straight for the exit.
—Adrian Searle
