Alvaro Barrington

Andrea G. Artz's portrait of Alvaro Barrington, the Venezuelan-Grenadian contemporary artist based in London whose painting and installation practice has drawn on Caribbean visual culture, hip-hop, and material experimentation. Like the other prints in Artz's portrait sequence, the work translates a digital photographic source into the layered idiom of Japanese water-based woodblock: the image is decomposed into colour separations, transferred to a series of cherry or shina blocks via a key block, and pulled by hand onto sized [washi](/glossary/washi) using a [baren](/glossary/baren) and pigments thinned with rice paste. The technique compresses the gradations of photographic skin tones into discrete tonal zones, with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) softening the transitions between them. The choice to render a fellow contemporary artist in mokuhanga aligns with Artz's broader interest in moving images between media — from portrait photography into print, from print into folded three-dimensional paper construction — and treats the woodblock not as reproduction but as a hand-registered re-making of the photographic encounter.