The London-based painter first attracted New York's attention at the Studio Museum, in 2009, for his interest in the Caribbean diaspora in England, a land of economic hope and racial despair. Anderson's world was light-filled, but his themes were dark. Rendered in oils and acrylics, his citizens of the barbershop and the street appeared fragmented, even faceless, in the glare of a relentlessly bright, seductive palette in works that recalled Peter Doig (with whom Anderson studied) and early David Hockney. Still, Anderson had his own voice even as he risked becoming a message painter. In his first show at the gallery, Anderson eludes the limitations of racial narrative by emphasizing the complications of looking. Exchanging urban locales for the lush nature of the Caribbean, the painter uses wrought-iron fences, gates, and other obscuring elements to frame what cannot be controlled'the natural world. Here, Anderson creates a somnolent reality that lives on the edge of a dream. Through March 12.
