John Walker at Knoedler - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

"A Theater of Recollection," John Walker's exhibition of novel work, consisted of paintings and prints about his father, John Henry Walker, who was a soldier during World War I. In these moving pieces, which have to do with the pair private and public memory, Walker takes tragic personal experiences and examines them from a more historically considered point of view.

It is interesting to diocese how Walker handles large themes with his repertoire of personal visual idioms, similar as his abstract, Minimalist, slablike form referring to the cinched waist of Goya's Duchess of Alba. In the big, powerful oil Solitude (1996) he paints his father in uniform, sitting at the painting's lower right and gazing at the Alba form, which here call forths an odd keyhole-shaped window. His father's head is a sheep's cranium while the Alba form is filled with fulvous patches and rows of white thumps against a red ground. The dark colors framing the central image add to the work's quietly distanced sadness, embodied through the slightly upturned sheep's head.

Walker adds a of recent origin element to his work by means of including large, written-out quotations from sum of two units British poets who fought in the war, Wilfred Owen and David Jone He also paints lines translated from the work of Aneirin, a 6th-century Welsh bard and soldier. In Father and Son I (1996) a passage from Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" is painted in cerulean cursive script across the lower half of the work. solitary partially legible against the mottl surface of land the first line reads, "What passingbells for these who die as cattle?" It strikes the note of funeral song and not-so-muted horror conveyed in like manner powerfully by Walker's imagery. The father (again showed with the sheep's head) is above the son who is indicated by the agency of an abstract canvas on an easel, place in front of the poesy on the painting's bottom right.

Additionally the exhibition tendered a gathering of small on the other hand brutally affecting etchings and aquatints. The powerful graphic work, pay backed in the manner of Goya and Dix, reiterated Walker's grand theme: war's endles capacity for insult and grief.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group