Voice of Commonwealth

The Visionary from Antigua

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ANTIGUA – The sense of isolation, of being alone in the natural world, is pervasive in Frank Walter’s art, and yet one can also sense a muted calm.

The exhibition By Land, Air, Home, and Sea: The World of Frank Walter at David Zwirner (June 2–July 29, 2022), curated by Hilton Als, is an incomplete introduction to the brilliant biracial Antiguan artist and writer Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter (1926–2009). Beset with visions, Walter chose to spend the last 15 years of his life in seclusion, living in a home he designed and built on a hill in Antigua, surrounded by his writing and art.

For those who wish to know more about Walter, It is recommended checking out the website of Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland, which gave Walter his first exhibition, as well as getting the highly informative catalogue Frank Walter: The Last Universal Man (Radius, 2017) by Barbara Paca, his most articulate champion. The catalogue was published for his exhibition in the national pavilion of Antigua and Barbuda at the 2017 Venice Biennale, which was the first time the country was represented in this important international venue. It was at the Venice Biennale that Als first became aware of Walter’s work, as he tells us in his curatorial essay.

By Land, Air, Home, and Sea includes more than 30 small landscapes and portraits done in pencil and oil paint on found and discarded materials, such as photographs, cardboard, Polaroid film cartridge boxes, and photographic paper (for a brief time Walter ran a makeshift photo studio in St. John’s, Antigua’s capital).

Walter’s landscapes are unpeopled, or the people are seen at a distance, and are usually obscured by a layer of paint. The sense of isolation, of being alone in the natural world, is pervasive. And yet, one can also sense a muted calm, as in “Untitled (Pinkish-Red-And-Grey Tree)” and “Untitled (Pink Sky, Green Field)” (all works undated). In “Untitled (Pinkish-Red-And-Grey Tree),” two large boulders rise about a third of the way up from the bottom edge. Emerging from behind the right side of one boulder is a green tree trunk topped by pinkish-red smudges. Beyond the tree is a dark green band signifying a field. A cluster of gray smudges, cropped by the painting’s right edge, is visible on the horizon; the sky is a blend of green and white. The boulders make this more than a painting of a tree. What are we standing on, and how will we climb over these obstacles? We can see the tree, but it is unlikely that we can reach it. 

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