Review by Horvin Andersson – This haunted, hazy, and beautiful show is like stumbling into someone’s memories | coloring

Us and them, then and now, concrete and jungle, acceptance and rejection… Birmingham and Jamaica. Horvin Andersson’s world is defined by conflicting contradictions, conflicts that can never be resolved.

The British artist’s dull, hazy, heat-soaked style of figurative painting is that he is trying to figure it all out, to make sense of a world that has no meaning. That it cannot do so – that you leave this large, poignant and often beautiful retrospective at Tate Britain with more questions than answers – does not mean that it has failed. The opposite in fact.

In the 1990s in Birmingham, where he grew up, Anderson began painting with photographs – family snapshots, pictures found in dusty boxes. A woman wearing a patterned dress seems to dissolve into the wallpaper behind her. The characters walking down the plane’s steps slowly turn into ghosts. His adult sister sitting next to her as a child.

The picture might promise a kind of nostalgic truth, but then Anderson paints it and everything falls apart. Geographic distance, past and present, all become intangible.

This is because Anderson – a black British man of Caribbean descent – is trying to process several ideas of belonging and history simultaneously. A huge painting of his sister and niece on a frozen lake in Canada leaves their faces completely featureless. They are there, but they do not belong. He paints his local Windley swimming pool in Broome as a kind of modernist dream, but from a distance, as if it’s not his own.

He then draws an apple tree above a mango tree, imagining his brother searching in England for one and in the Caribbean for the other. Identity is a fragile thing here, and it is easy to tear apart.

The only time the conflict stops is in the barbershop. This is a sacred place. A place where black people can belong without rejection. He paints it empty, quiet, church-like—then he paints it busy, the clients’ faces repeated in a hall of mirrors, the walls covered with portraits of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. One individual panel shows a lone man in a barber’s chair, facing away, his head apparently bowed in prayer.

Anderson abandons the bleak, gray, muddy misery of England at this point in favor of the lush, humid tropical beauty of the Caribbean. But things don’t seem any less oppressive.

In the early 2000s, he went to Trinidad and Tobago and saw iron security grilles in front of stores, and chain-link fences around private compounds. Not only do they frame views, they distance you from them. We and them again, but becoming physical. He paints country clubs behind the fences, and hotels reclaimed by the forest. Everything again seems to be falling apart.

The same themes, ideas, and even the same images, are reworked and reworked over and over again. The same barbershop scene, reshaped several times with new elements, the same red security grid framing different scenes, the same woman on the same wallpaper. You walk around the rooms and think: Wait, didn’t I just see that? I did, but not quite. It’s like stumbling into someone else’s memories.

Because that’s exactly what happens. He redraws these scenes, not because memories change, but because he changes. You won’t always think the same way about your childhood entertainment center or the local library as you get older. So Anderson keeps reprocessing.

But, unlike Peter Doig (also a serious painter of memory and the Caribbean), this is not a purely sentimental attempt to engage with the past; It’s a deeply political issue, too. Anderson’s hotels in Jamaica were built for white guests, in a country founded on slavery and colonial exploitation. He draws black spaces inhabited by black shapes, he draws white spaces swallowed by the forest, he draws the roads, fences and corridors that divide a black country into two halves, he draws colonial history as it re-imposes itself on the post-colonial present.

The paintings are haunted by slavery, colonialism, and the clash of identities because he is haunted by these things, because the Caribbean is haunted by them, and so is Britain.

But more importantly, it’s also an absolutely beautiful painting. Anderson combines geometric and modernist rigidity with strokes of pointillism and gestural color and collapses freehand shapes into simple grids. Stand in the second-to-last room between the five different panels of the same concrete staircase in an ever-changing jungle, and you will lose yourself in the marks and colors, bright blues, pulsating purples and deep greens. It’s amazing.

It is all based on a feeling of unresolved conflict. But who needs a solution when the board is this good?