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 using a baren and pigments thinned with rice paste. The technique compresses the gradations of photographic skin tones into discrete tonal zones, with 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.