Human Nature Alvaro Barrington

Overview
Human Nature, Alvaro Barrington
"I've been in Brazil for nearing two weeks now and I'm two weeks away from my first show in South America. It would be an understatement to say that the region has given me so much. I think less of nation-states more like the notion of regional cousins. My first birth over 40 years ago was in Venezuela, a regional cousin that borders the north of here. But I want to write about one of my other births — the one that led me to become a painter. 
 
At 25 living in NYC, I was stuck. The rapper 50 Cent put it best with the lyric “Damn homie. In high school you was the man, homie, the fuck happened to you?” And so at 25 I was confronted with the existential realization that what I considered a life lived had peaked when I was 18 years old. The dreams for me which made my parents immigrate to America and that fell apart resulted in me making choices that made my life worse than they could have imagined. 
 
Taking inspiration from my parents, I bought a one-way ticket and decided to move to Venezuela. One day a few friends and I decided we were going to travel as far south as possible on the Orinoco River, maybe even to Brazil. Most of the time spent on the boat I took photos, watched the Amazon and wrote. Mostly I questioned how I lost myself. One day looking at variations of greens - green of the plant life - along the river and how they grouped themselves for survival I realized I had spent the last decade trapped in a tyranny of expectation. I was no longer a person formed from active looking and choosing. And here in the Orinoco, I gave birth to the journey Norte the commitment to learning to become free. 
 
This exhibition is me coming to terms with that journey Norte 15 years later in what feels like a return home to give thanks. Yarn paintings that suggest looking at farmland miles above. A house is not a home—C-S.P. (cousins in São Paulo) is a four-paneled painting depicting the international exchange of culture and physical migration that makes a journey a home. It sits on a carpet made of sea ropes suggesting notions pulling. The word Norte spray painted on each side is inspired by “América Invertida” a 1943 pen-and-ink drawing by the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres, which suggests the truth of the universe is constantly shifting as earth spins forward."

– Alvaro Barrington, March, 2023
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