Donald Locke looked at all the formal aesthetic experimentation of the 1950s and 60s, all the minimalism and modernism and abstract expressionism, and thought: “Hold on. There’s something missing here. Something big.” The three grim, heavy, black monochromatic paintings that greet you as you walk into this show, called Resistant Forms, at Spike Island, the first major retrospective of the Guyanese-British artist’s work in the UK, have all the hallmarks of minimalism. They are dark, simple, ultra-formal images, a single colour on each canvas, covered in geometric grids, like Bauhaus in mourning. But the shapes and grids that define each work are not just experiments in form, they are not just an artist trying to push aesthetic boundaries: each is based on the architecture of the plantation.
Suddenly, this formal minimalism becomes heavily weighed down by history, exploitation and oppression. Now, those formal geometric structures look like fields of sugar cane, bodies packed too close together in cramped dorms, sweaty and suffering. Fur peeks out of a metal grate cut into one of the canvases, as if countless animals are pressed in there, caged. They are incredible, powerful, uncomfortable, shocking paintings.
