In Alvaro Barrington's work, pieces always seem to have come from afar. They carry within them the memory of successive journeys, passages, and transmissions. In "On the Road (TMS)," presented at the Villa Kast in Salzburg, this impression is almost literal: the murals, transformed into tapestries, appear to have traveled even before finding their place on the wall. They do not present themselves as static images, but as active surfaces, woven with interwoven narratives and cultural references. His new series, which he has chosen to title New Cutout Paintings, fully embraces this logic of movement and continuous transformation.
Born in the 1980s and trained in the United Kingdom, Alvaro Barrington grew up between several geographies and cultural states, an instability that permeates his work without ever transforming it into a direct autobiographical narrative. The artist doesn't tell his story: he uses it as material. His work is constructed through assemblage, blending Caribbean heritages, musical references, textile traditions, modern abstraction, and popular culture. This constant hybridization reflects a conception of identity based on circulation, use, and sharing rather than on origin or territorial roots.
The exhibition's title immediately opens up a field of multiple associations. "On the Road" evokes both the foundational wandering of the Beat Generation and the concrete circulation of the artworks themselves, which moved from Tate Britain to the Mangrove float during the Notting Hill Carnival before being reconfigured for Salzburg. At the heart of each room is a central painting—the very one that traveled from London to Notting Hill—now enlarged and reimagined for the Austrian exhibition. This mobility is not anecdotal: it profoundly enriches the structure of the works, which have experienced several states, several contexts, and still bear the visible traces of these successive transformations.
The choice of burlap, the central material of this series, is never neutral. Associated with the cocoa and coffee trade, it carries an economic and colonial history that Alvaro Barrington doesn't explicitly depict but allows to surface through his treatment of the surface. Thick, rough, and sometimes irregular, it accommodates painted fragments, screen-printed impressions, and forms sewn directly onto the material. Thread becomes an essential element: it connects, repairs, and holds together disparate elements. These practices are rooted in Caribbean textile traditions, but also in skills passed down by the women in the artist's family, situating the works within a long-term perspective, at the crossroads of art and craft.
The figures that appear in his compositions are drawn from carnival: Moko Jumbie, Blue Devil, Jab Jab… They traverse surfaces like ritual presences, both protective and transgressive. The silkscreened portrait of the musician Buju Banton, a central motif of the Cutout PaintingsIt acts as a visual and rhythmic anchor point. Around it, colored squares—inspired by both Josef Albers' chromatic research and Kuba textiles—structure the pictorial space, while the cutouts recall both Matisse's cut-outs and African textile motifs. Alvaro Barrington does not represent the carnival as a static folklore, but as a living space of resistance, community, and transformation, where bodies reclaim public space through movement, repetition, and noise.
The geometric patterns that run through the works draw heavily on the vocabulary of Kuba textiles. Their repetition, their visual energy, their controlled imbalance remind us that textiles were also a form of currency, a symbol of power and circulation. These references engage with the history of Western art without ever dissolving into it. In Alvaro Barrington's work, influences do not simply overlap: they coexist, sometimes in tension, like so many simultaneous narratives.
What is at play in "On the Road (TMS)" perhaps lies in this constant opposition between weight and movement. The works have a strong, almost gravitational, physical presence, but all tell a story of transition. In their current form—now brought together under the title Cutout Paintings They remain open, ready to be moved, pursued elsewhere. They remind us that images, like individuals, live from what they experience, and that art can become a space where multiple stories coexist, without ever closing in on a single one.
“Alvaro Barrington – On the Road (TMS)”
Villa Kast
Mirabellplatz 2, Salzburg (Austria)
