Adam Bartos / David Wilson
It's not an awesome vision we're confronted with viewing these color photographs shot on the islands of Trinidad and Tobago. Bartos is more a quiet noticer of the arrangements in out of the way alleys, yards and the overlooked corners of cantinas in the luxuriously empty afternoon. He seems particularly fond of catching the geometry of road signs and fences against the island's natural tropic eloquence of greenery and dirt-pathed villages.
The shots are entirely void of people or any activity beside the unnoticeable passage of time. The emptiness is startling as we peek into deserted cornices and hushed recesses. Bartos zeroes in on the important junction where a shack starts to rise from the ground. The stillness is accompaniment for this ordinary arrangement flattered to magnificence with a new attention. There's not even a bird passing through to upset the staid, almost breathless strung-out moment he's found chiseled out of the landscape on his walk around.
The colors resulting from the coupler print process, which capture the tropic colors we expect—burnt oranges, pale blues and rose tints—are inviting, soothing, warm and enticing. They alone are almost persuasive enough to win us over. But, too often, Barton shoots where he believes the lushness of the scene is worthy of our attention. We can get that information looking at friend's vacation slides. To earn their price and to deserve their rich matting and frames the shots need to transform my moment. I demand to be transfixed, at least.
With #17 he breaks through by relaxing his need for strict order and the solid composite. Here two gourds hanging by thin strings seem to float in a room we're looking out of. Two intersecting walls are gorgeous expanses—one green, the other orange—and meet at a door that is open onto a yard of out-of-focus shrubbery fading into the stark, shock of daylight that wakes us up from the dreamy laziness of the still room. His scenes are like talismans to induce pleasant fevers.
In the back room, David Wilson showed a handsomely grouped number of collages, comprised of photo silk-screened images, painted washes, magazines snips and a few indecipherable words. A nod to Rauschenberg is unavoidable, but these pieces are certainly a lot less random and frenetic. Rather than being about the excitement of absorbing the local stimula, Wilson's pieces attain a more solemn affect, a more balanced logic, a more whispering mood.
(COVER, January 1989)