John Walker at Knoedler & Company - Brief Article

"Time and Tides," John Walker's exhibition of new work, was really two shows in one. Half of the dozen paintings were somber, earthen-colored near-abstractions inspired by the beach, rocks and horizon of the Maine coastline. The other works were predominantly black, white and gray, covered with calligraphy, and devoted to the subjects of war and the artist's father.

The war paintings, a couple of which were nearly 17 feet wide, expanded laterally like graffiti-covered walls. Cursive, wet-into-wet texts--excerpts from the work of English World War I poets David Jones and Wilfred Owen and from Rosanna Warren's 1997 poem Mud (for John Walker)--ramble across monochrome fields, sometimes illegibly, like a drunken diary. The poetry, often woven through a painted matrix like a chain-link fence, is juxtaposed with cartoonish figures, reminiscent of Basquiat's imagery, that include Walker's signature sheep-skullheaded man, a stand-in for the British-born artist's father, who was wounded in the trenches.

These big war pictures are not pretty. They have an angry, muddy, blood-and-guts feel. Their power is established through large-scale, expressionist handling and the written word. But the paintings rely too heavily on these constructs. Walker's recurring father figure adds to the paintings' elegiac timbre, but the image remains too specific to suggest a wider meaning. The texts move frustratingly between loud, jostling pattern and an intimate, poetic voice, and are never truly integrated with the figures. Nevertheless, the paintings strike a nerve; they left me feeling uncomfortable, as if I were witnessing something essentially private, like mourning, made theatrically public.

The seascapes, leaden and gritty, were more satisfying. Their stormy, nocturnal pigments of brown, rust, orange and ocher, mixed with black and white, seem to thicken like wet sand. In such works as Morning Light, Ebb Tide, the turbulent black and orange brushstrokes recall the fiery aftermath of a sea battle.

An oversized biomorphic form--evocative of a tidal pool, hourglass, palette or puzzle piece--appears in each of the coastal paintings. This enigmatic icon, central to the seascapes in both composition and meaning, seems residuary and beyond definition. Like the wandering father figure of the war paintings, it is elusive, spectral. But this newer symbol feels found rather than fabricated, born of the experience of the coast, and has the associative potential to evolve beyond the personal to the universal.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group