His new series “Barbary,” on display at Kasmin’s new gallery in Chelsea, is a study of the Barbary lion. He has mastered the lush aesthetic and technique of his predecessors (though he works from taxidermy at the American Museum of Natural History and photos on the Internet) but puts the absurdity and folly-and the sex and the violence-back into an otherwise sanitized genre. These contradictions are not lost on Ford. Yet it’s impossible to look at such images today without also seeing their cost: the greedy appropriation of exotic species and cultures, the rush for profit, and the careless underestimation of our ability to annihilate entire populations of creatures we claim to revere. The vicarious thrill of imagining seeing a species for the first time. I, too, love the artifacts of that obsession, the attempted anatomical precision, the charmingly weird field notes. Since the 1990s, Ford has been retrospectively caught up in the nineteenth century’s obsession with nature, back when the mountains were crawling with lions, and the sky was full of birds. Walton Ford makes paintings of paintings of animals. His American Flamingo (1992) flails head over heels after being shot with a rifle, and an eagle with its foot in a trap billows smoke from its beak (Audubon, in search of a painless method of execution, tried unsuccessfully to asphyxiate an eagle with sulfurous gas).įord is never interested merely in the natural world, but in the way humans have documented, exploited, and repurposed it, and how these species have been mythologized, even as most of them have disappeared from the wild. In his early riffs on Audubon prints, Ford painted birds mid-slaughter. Something’s always outrageously off, though: the gorilla is holding a human skull a couple of parrots are mating on the shaft of an elephant’s penis. They are annotated in longhand script, and yellowed at the edges as if stained by time and voyage. Looking at the paintings of Walton Ford in a book, you might mistake them for the watercolors of a nineteenth-century naturalist.
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