Ghosted – Barbara Walker: Vanishing Point

Jo Manby

A review of Barbara Walker’s major exhibition, Vanishing Point, on show at Cristea Roberts Gallery in London until 23 April 2022, with a range of works on paper combining blind embossing with graphite, plus a large-scale charcoal drawing occupying one wall of the gallery.

For her recent work, Barbara Walker, who was born in Birmingham UK in 1964, and studied at the University of Central England, Birmingham and Wolverhampton University, conducts time-consuming research into archives and art collections before formulating new ways of reclaiming the classic Western European art historical canon by ensuring Black characters are centre stage. The irony that the works are being shown in a gallery space in an area of London close by the seat of the former British Empire is not an irrelevance.

There are over twenty works on show at Cristea Roberts Gallery, mounted and framed in pure white. In the majority of the works, a blind embossed reworking of a historic work of art has been printed onto thick, high-quality Somerset Satin paper using photopolymer gravure plates. Walker has the blind embossing, which means printing without ink, undertaken by a printmaker. The process involves pressing bas relief textures onto dampened paper using a printing press, so that light and shadow are cast to create an image. The scenes revisit paintings by, variously, Van Dyck, Veronese, Cuyp or Titian, among others. Of the white figure or figures, nothing is left but the raised bumps of the embossing. The resulting effect is of a spreading colourless rash on bloodless skin. Only the attendant Black figures command attention. They are exquisitely drawn out in detailed graphite, and given back their personalities, their vivid interior lives reinvested and celebrated.

Noticeable from the dates of the works is that a progression can be traced from the drawings close to the beginning of the exhibition towards the finale of the charcoal wall drawing at the back of the gallery space. Ignoring date chronology, the exhibition starts off with the works with the least graphite additions, which were actually the later works, and the viewer then sees other earlier versions of the same scenes, with a greater area of drawing and less left pure white. Thus, the arrangement and presentation of the work itself implies an upsurge in power or confidence as the graphite takes over more and more pictorial territory.

Because the white parts of the works are created using a printing press and photopolymer gravure plate while the graphite is hand-drawn, there is an implicit reversal of the conventional value placed on the various characters depicted. Walker is interested in the hierarchies imposed on artists’ media, with painting for example traditionally invested with higher worth than drawing or printing, and the meanings these distinctions can imply. Print reproduction suggests a degree of impersonality, the subjects from the ‘old masters’ (white women and men dripping in jewellery and brocade, wielding symbols of power and prestige) are a cliché and can be dealt with summarily. The focus is now on heightening the visibility of the Black people in the picture.

In the huge, impressive wall drawing, four Black figures, all from different paintings, are depicted free of context. It is a dynamic, questioning work. Each face is looking at something, but it is unclear at what. With the white figures gone (subsumed by the gallery wall?) the Black figures are left to redefine their own identities.

Thinking of the title of the exhibition, ‘Vanishing Point’, perspective has shifted 360° by the time the viewer reaches the four small works adjacent to the wall drawing. Here, the finery is obscured by tracing paper-like mylar. It’s like saying, we know you had all this finery, but we’re not interested in that. We’re interested in the other person in the picture. Walker recalls visiting museums and galleries as a child and noticing the absence of Black people in the portraits she was seeing: ‘…art school provided me with the important opportunities to think about how as an artist I had the power to push back, and to create images other than the nasty corrosive caricatures of Black people frequently peddled by the mainstream media and dominant culture.’

The criticism here is of the system and of institutionalised racial prejudice, rather than an attack on the aesthetic quality of the works themselves. Not far from Cristea Roberts Gallery, the Titian painting Diana and Actaeon (1556-59), referenced by Walker in Vanishing Point 18 (Titian) (2020) can be seen at the National Gallery. Noticing it on the way to see another show at the National, I realised that compositionally, the Black female figure on the far right of the painting, acts as the end-stop, the stanchion that holds in check the entire flow of the work’s dynamic, as the goddess Diana and her attendant nymphs recoil towards the right, away from the marauding left-hand figure of Actaeon. The position of the Black nymph’s arms mirror Actaeon’s gesture as he brushes away a red curtain to reveal the scene. This recalls the way colonial systems used Black people to underpin Western establishment, institutions, and wealth.

The other exhibition is Kehinde Wiley’s ‘The Prelude’, on show at the National Gallery until 18 April 2022, which also reveals the political forcefulness and power in reclaiming the art historical scenes of European Romanticism, placing iridescent portraits of young Black men and women in the heart of the action in reworkings of paintings by artists such as Caspar David Friedrich. They are the protagonists, the actors in the scenes.

What’s visually striking about Wiley’s show is the kaleidoscopic colour range. While in Walker’s work, the effect is of rendering the state of the Western European tradition of art history morally and aesthetically bankrupt: without colour, they are nothing. It’s as if the rich tapestry of the world is a rug pulled from under their feet. The entitled are rendered unentitled, the lauding unlauded, those endowed with the riches of the British, Dutch and Spanish empires without endowment.