"The sea and sky made me think that Walter — aware that he was alone in the universe — was focusing on palpable things, even if they were unreachable. Yet this is only one part of his diverse oeuvre."
“Antigua had Frank Walter. I didn't know a thing about him that spring day in Venice when I arrived at the Pavilion of Antigua and Barbuda, but it was as if my eyes and my heart recognized him at once. Not only as a master artist but as a maker of a universe completely his own, grown out of the richness and debris that sometimes characterizes the life of a West Indian island dweller who is not rich, who must make a world out of making do. It seemed to me, that afternoon as I scanned the vitrines and talked to Barbara Paca–who had curated the show with such love and energy and commitment to getting that part of the world known–that Walter did everything and wanted to do everything. I remember leaving Barbara that afternoon now so long ago and thinking, as I walked along the Grand Canal, that I wasn't walking along the waters in Venice at all, but was somewhere else, near the waters of Antigua, perhaps, with Frank Walter's heart beating over my heart, and his eye layered over the ancient Italian world I was in at that moment, filling it with bent palm trees, rivers, and skies that stopped only because the canvas frame couldn't take any more beauty, but the mind could. That was what I understood that afternoon, with Walter: he gives more glory and truth than we think we can bear. And then gives some more as we rush to meet it.”
"The works themselves are both harrowing yet simple in their expressive beauty. They show a man who desperately wished to archive, quite extensively, the lands which housed and nurtured him. It was noted that Walter, with reluctance from his nephew Jules, would often spend weeks in isolation in a small inhabitants away from the family’s regular housing, only surviving on water and the most necessary nutrients. He lived for the sake of meditating on his utopia, and for that it feels only necessary that we observe his archive with the closeness he attempted to achieve with the landscape and characters themselves."
“If the political experiences of his racist abuse in Britain and Germany and the bigger narratives of slavery, colonialism and post-colonialism are brought into sharper focus with the many dialogues staged, often the contemporary works are also in a tug of war with the fantastical, apolitical and even reactionary inner life and psychic traumas so central to Walter’s art.”
“It is in these cosmic works, which recall Sun Ra’s conception of space as a site of liberation, that Walter’s approach to life becomes most evident; as a journey in search of worlds capable of accommodating the depth and breadth of far-reaching hopes and visions. He was at once a product of his time and light years ahead of it; an artist who left universes to explore in his wake.”
“Frank Walter: The black king from Europe. His paintings seek a balance between skin color and value. They are echoes of a relentless colonial system - the values of which he could never tragically renounce. ‘He is the Caribbean father of modern painting,’ says his 91-year old cousin actor Jules Walter.”
“But in loneliness where the warm Caribbean wind never stops blowing forcefully, Walter designed an image world beyond all genre boundaries with incredible intensity. He painted primarily at night, referring to the memories he had experienced and his artistic imagination. This is the only way to explain that with Walter a single fine brush stroke turns into a whole cloud trail on the horizon. A few swabs are enough to form a green meadow. A thick, moist pink dries, then tears open and a petal is formulated. Frank Walter didn’t trust any style. Abstraction, figuration, imagination, all of these unite and at the same time dissolve in his work. But it was precisely because of his open motifs and stylistic complexity that he managed to transport the ideas of romanticism into modernity.”
“Something is now happening in the MMK in Frankfurt that Frank Walter so dearly wanted. His work can be seen and viewed in brightly lit rooms. there they can take us to a reality, sweep us away and open closed doors. Because when he looks at his pictures, something wonderful is achieved: Walter does not stop us with narratives of identity politics, but conveys a world that we share with him.
They show the life of an aristocrat, intellectual, large landowner, artist and day laborer. Walter’s identity was of a complex structure, he saw himself in noble genealogy, at the same time lived in poor conditions. Foreign identifications like skin color have always irritated him. Perhaps he fled to isolation from these patterns, foreign attributions and colonizations. But he was free. In art, he united old Europe with the new world. In his pictures, his story becomes our story.”
"Catrin Lorch happily returns from the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art in the SZ , which is devoting the first major retrospective to the Caribbean painter, sculptor and poet Frank Walter. To Lorch the work of the artist and descendants of slaves and German plantation owners, who worked in English mines and at Mannesmann in the Ruhr area before returning to Antigua, appears almost manic. "If you look at the motifs he found in Antigua after his return to Antigua Year 1967 dedicated, now experienced in its entirety, it is surprising how they trace the canon of a bourgeois, almost Biedermeier painting on the surface. Portraits, friendship pictures, animals, landscapes, especially panoramas - a few chunks of mountain, horizon lines, water surfaces, sky, palm trees. He switches between figuration and abstraction with ease, between dreamlike scenarios and very concrete images."
“Divesting themselves of grandeur, conventionally reserved for sceneries of the archipelago, Frank Walter’s landscapes reject depictions of terra nullius. Instead, they imbue nature with a sense of ontological unease. The framing of paintings, a great part of which is devoted to the late artist's birthplace of Antigua, almost violently cuts the setting into seemingly trivial fragments, de-exoticing the mise en scène. Ominous, at points monstrous undertones intensify my first visit to the museum after months of self-isolation.”
“Walter’s artworks are reduced to an almost diagrammatic skeleton, capturing instability that ceases to be either climatic or spectacular. Eschewing the standards of a sustain-release dramatic structure, the instability is perennial, incessant, offering a window into brief instances in the life of someone whose very presence made him antagonistic to the realities of his (and our) times.”
“This may be felt as an overload of Frank Walter's painting, which never addressed racist and political debate in his works. But at the same time one remembers a formulation by the curator Harald Szeemann, who once characterized certain forms of outsider art: "No idyll without catastrophe, no catastrophe without idyll". In any case, the catastrophic idyll of Frank Walter affects one.”
Gregor Quack. "Pictures of loneliness." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17 May, 2020.
Christian Huther. “Poet with color, form, and figures. Main Echo, 17 May, 2020.
"Walter’s work is found in the company of Algerian psychiatrist and liberationist Franz Fanon, Carnival of West London struggle for identity, self-determination, and de-colonialization."
“A life as a total work of art: This is also reflected in his art, which unfolds an enormous wealth of perspectives in an almost romantic overview of all possible subjects and design elements.”
“The mouth of a shark and three colored circles. A gray triangle on the left on the horizon. It is the first of an endless number of images in this retrospective by Frank Walter at the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art. A simple composition and yet very sophisticated. Because it appears completely abstract in parts, figurative in others and because one is subordinate to the other. You can interpret the three circles as balls, the triangle as a mountain - and the flat image gets a considerable depth. Walter has mastered both forms of expression and much more. He was a man of many talents. One who designed cosmological-mathematical drawings of great dynamism and entangled microcosms with macrocosms in fascinating compositions. At the same time an accomplished landscape painter who condensed the intensity of a sultry evening or a shimmering afternoon in sometimes tiny paintings. Who could create worlds with which a handful of casually thrown brush strokes on thin wooden plates, cardboard disks or packaging backsides, in which one would like to sink.”
“Although the artist was always aware of the quality of his work, it was not shown during his lifetime. A complete exhibition was stored in boxes at his home. It was only in 2017 that parts of his work could be seen at the Venice Biennale in the National Pavilion of Antigua and Barbuda. The curator, the American Barbara Paca, had known Walter herself.”
“It is not a matter of course that his relatives kept this legacy, protected it from hurricanes and insect feeding. But when two years ago Antigua & When Barbuda was represented for the first time with a pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the boxes and boxes were ready and had found their time, as in a message in a bottle.”
“The kinship of the green overgrown horizon lines with romanticism and the proximity of his stenciled color fields to abstraction prove that he also painted himself into an art and cultural history. "The European world was my world, not because I forced myself to like or accept it; it was inherently my world. I couldn't do without it any more than I could have done without my limbs."
Sarah Douglas, "Editor-in-Chief of Art News and her top pick at Venice Biennale. An alternative perspective: What transcends the almighty market?” Modern Luxury, December, 2017.
“…Astonishing exhibition… The whole show has been expertly curated by Barbara Paca, cultural envoy to Antigua and Barbuda. She has found apt quotations to accompany the work and provides even more information if you are lucky enough to meet her at the show.”
“The Pavilion, and its hefty accompanying catalogue, is a fascinating case study regarding the choices curators can make in dealing with complicated artists. In [Valerie] Rousseau’s reckoning, the Pavilion organizers “really dig into all the possible biographical facts they could.”
“I think the tone was right…I think it was a point of view that was risky.”
“I was incredibly excited by the inaugural Biennale presentation of Antigua and Barbuda, Frank Walter: The Last Universal Man, organized by Barbara Paca. The exhibition features paintings and sculptures alongside furniture, writings and ephemera from Walter’s secluded rural home and studio; offering a fascinating and moving glimpse into the life of the prolific and profound multidisciplinary artist.”
“One of the most interesting one comes from Antigua. It is that country's first participation. Many missed this one, but a visit is well worth it! The pavilion is small, is also situated on a small island and celebrates the artist Frank Walter who died eight years ago. He lived in extreme poverty, was the child of a slave owner and a slave, a fragmented identity. He travelled extensively in Europe during the fifties and sixties, where he experienced extreme racism. Afterwards he lived in the Antiguan countryside, intensely interested in questions of ecology and agriculture. He was a pioneer. And he painted over 5,000 paintings! An unbelievable body of work, which has not been seen so far. He also wrote poems, worked in nearly all art disciplines. He was the Leonardo da Vinci of Antigua.”
Niko Kos Earle. “An overview of the national pavilions at the 2017 Venice Biennale.” Art Bastion, 28 May, 2017.
“If there is one National Pavilion you must not miss it is the first Antigua & Barbuda Pavilion… The exhibition begins with an encounter between beautiful minds at that crucial moment when one was on the brink of disappearing…This exhibition invites visitors to inhabit the creative world and discover the humanist vision of this now seminal Caribbean artist.”
“The link between an Antiguan painter and a New York neurosurgeon seems unlikely at best, but life does have a way of making some rather extraordinary connections. Dr. Paca sought not only to expose his art, but also to explore his mind through recordings of their conversations and investigation of a several thousand-page long manifesto.”
“Some of the better national presentations are tucked away in palazzos, churches, and gardens across town. They can be hard to find – but some are worth the hunt. That’s true of a selection of paintings by the Caribbean artist Frank Walter at the Antigua and Barbuda Pavilion.”
“The work of Antigua & Barbuda’s National Pavilion and artist Frank Walter reflects a life with a simple elegance in the artist’s work - a clarity which is lacking in many other presentations at the Biennale.”
“Best Rediscovery – I gotta give credit to ARTnews scribe Andrew Russeth, who always seems to somehow see everything, for recommending that we go check out the Antigua and Barbuda pavilion. I’m glad I did. “Frank Walter: The Last Universal Man 1926-2009” happens to be the first ever outing in Venice for the Caribbean commonwealth, and also happens to be great: An illuminating, scholarly look at the life and art of a figure who has been compared to Adolf Wolfli and Henry Darger, but who has a story too riveting and singular to butcher by abbreviating it here. Just go take a look.”
“Of the 85 national pavilions, five are presented by countries participating in the Biennale for the first time. The most eye-opening is the pavilion of Antigua and Barbuda…his paintings – of Antiguan flora, the insignia of European nobility, or small abstractions of stars and circles that recall the Pop Art of Robert Indiana – open onto a world much larger than that small dwelling.”
“The Biennale is officially open. Don’t miss the remarkable Frank Walter retrospective in Antigua and Barbuda’s inaugural National Pavilion.”Jacqueline Ceresoli."Antigua e per la prima volta in Europa, espone Frank Walter: un visionario pittore e scrittore autoproclamatosi settimo Principe delle Indie Occidentali."
“A nation of just over 91,000 people, Antigua & Barbuda is mounting an ambitious exhibition celebrating the life of the late artist and poet Frank Walter, who passed away in 2009. “The Last Universal Man 1926-2009” provides a deep look into the artist’s mind through a selection of his works, which span 5,000 pieces of art and 50,000 pages of archival material. The first person of color to run a sugar plantation in Antigua, Walter descended from both slaves and slave owners, and struggled to reconcile these distinct parts of his identity, ultimately channeling exploration of his past and present into an imaginative world of philosophy, poetry, art, and music.”
“At the end of it all, and despite several worthy displays, I am still surprised at how little of Art Basel Hong Kong’s 2014 edition remains in my thoughts. Reminding myself of the impossibility of meaningful viewing in this context, I feel less guilty, and able to contemplate the works I do recall, among them a series of paintings by Antiguan artist Frank Walter (1926-2009) presented by Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh. Using whatever materials he could find–from cardboard to scraps of driftwood–Walter painted in a way that was both humble and direct, his simple abstractions of the Caribbean landscape, like the undated Tree with red leaves and rainbow cruise ship, belying their mastery of figure and form. These paintings, and their roots in a specific time and place, remind us that aspirations towards the truly global can only ever be utopian, and how those very claims towards transcendence can rely on continued assertions of ‘the local’. It is discoveries like these, moreover, that could give new sense to what it means for an art fair to be ‘truly global’–that is to enable undervalued artists in overlooked locations to earn deserved recognition, whether at home or abroad.”
Stuart Kelly. “A question of identity: The case of a Caribbean painter who was convinced he was Scottish raises important questions about the effect of colonial oppression on both the conquered and the conqueror,” Scottish Field Magazine, June 2013, pp. 72-76.
Duncan MacMillan. "Visual Art." The Scotsman, 28 February 2013."Songs of Innocence and Experience." The Guardian, 9 February 2013.
Malcolm Jack."‘Homecoming’ for tropical visionary: Exhibition to show work of Antiguan artist inspired by Scots landscape." Scotland on Sunday, News, 3 February 2013.