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Frank Walter at David Zwirner review - visions of beauty to soothe a turbulent mind

<p>Untitled (Pink and lavender sky with green foreground and brown plantings)</p> (Courtesy Kenneth M Milton Fine Arts)

Untitled (Pink and lavender sky with green foreground and brown plantings)

(Courtesy Kenneth M Milton Fine Arts)

The late Antiguan artist Frank Walter’s story is remarkable. Born in 1926, he was a descendant of enslaved people and plantation owners and became the first person of colour to be a manager in the Antiguan Sugar Syndicate, where he sought to improve labourers’ rights and conditions. On a trip to the UK, Germany and Italy in the 1950s, ostensibly to learn about modern agricultural technologies, he further expanded his artistic and academic horizons, despite experiencing extreme discrimination.

He returned to Antigua in 1961, but found that his new agricultural knowledge fell on deaf ears. After a spell in Dominica, he ended up running a photographic and framing shop in St John’s, Antigua, before living the last years until his death in 2009 in poverty, in a self-made home on a hill overlooking the sea and countryside, surrounded by the work in this show.

LANDSCAPE Untitled (Airplanes over boats in harbor)
LANDSCAPE Untitled (Airplanes over boats in harbor)

Walter had a mental illness, for which art was a vital balm and source of balance. He wrestled with his complex background, inventing a heritage leading back to European royalty to become the self-styled “Seventh Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies and the Ding-Ding Nook”. A handwritten family tree is among the archival documents in this show.

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Walter was a polymath, writing plays, treatises, musical scores and making 1,000 drawings, 2,000 photographs, 600 hand-carved wooden sculptures. This exhibition focuses on some of his 5,000 paintings.

Untitled (Abstract Triangles Red, Yellow, Black and Silver)
Untitled (Abstract Triangles Red, Yellow, Black and Silver)

The compulsion to create which produced that vast body of work is palpable. He seems to have grabbed anything he could to paint on – cardboard, the backs of photographs, boxes from Polaroid film, now often dogeared or battered. The least interesting works are those relating to his pursuit of that imagined royal past – heraldic dragons, lizards and griffins – important biographically but artistically rather dull. There are a couple of portraits, including a self-portrait, with a disarming directness and power. But the key bodies of work here are landscapes and mystical abstracts.

The landscapes are raw, instinctive, yet wonderfully sensitive. The best among them are paintings made on Polaroid boxes – a few marks, in delicious and often unexpected colours, that instantly evoke light and heat, and achieve a sublime depth despite their tiny scale. In others, a map of Antigua appears in the middle of these expressive studies, an emblem of Walter’s profound engagement with the island.

Untitled (Watermelon)
Untitled (Watermelon)

The abstracts are hard-edged, multi-coloured, unconventional, and appear to underpin a unique philosophy rather than relating to the dominant abstractions in post-war Europe and the US. What this powerful show conveys is that painting was at the core Walter’s investigation of his place in the world – his immediate environment, his complex hinterland and the mysteries of existence.

David Zwirner, W1, to May 22. davidzwirner.com

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