A master of outsized ambitions

John Walker's "Light and Forms" has roots in Maine.

John Walker:
A Survey 1970-2008
At: Nielsen Gallery, 179 Newbury St.,
through April 5, and Kidder Smith
Gallery, 131 Newbury St., through
March 29. 617-266-4835,
nielsengallery.com

Stephen Barker:
The Archivist’s Wig
At Bernard Toale Gallery, 450 Harrison
Ave., through March 29. 617-482-
2477, bernardtoalegallery.com

There's something Shakespearean about John Walker's paintings. His forms create a restless, driving poetry. His paint reads as an essential force of life. Big canvases squirm with hurt and wrestle with pride. Their brooding expressionism shimmers between abstraction and representation.

Walker, 69, a powerhouse painter from Birmingham, England, director of the graduate painting department at Boston University, has an invigorating survey of works dating back to 1970 up on Newbury Street. Nielsen Gallery, alert to the late collector Edward R. Broida's bequest of several Walker paintings to three major museums, latched itself to the caboose of that gift and gathered up Walker paintings that remained in Broida's estate. Then it borrowed paintings from private collectors to flesh out the exhibition.

Some of the works are so big, they wouldn't fit at Nielsen, so the gallery has rented out the high-ceilinged Kidder Smith Gallery for the month to exhibit some outsized paintings, as tall as 10 feet.

The show is more like a stone skipping over the deep waters of Walker's oeuvre than a good soak. It touches on giant collaged paintings of the 1970s, work made in Australia during the 1980s, grisly meditations on World War I in the 1990s, and his recent Maine landscapes, which range from dark and mud-laden to exuberant. The installation darts from decade to decade, revealing a through-line of vigorous gestures, romance with key forms, and relentless purpose.

Of all the works here, the giant collages are my least favorite; they read like an intellectual exercise, formal puzzles put together out of large scraps of canvas. In Australia, Walker turned strictly to painting. His canvases from there are a spicy stew of images and text. At the center of most was an abstracted form borrowed from Goya's "Duchess of Alba"; it looks like a door, slightly ajar, but cinched at the waist, like the duchess's gown.

The searing triptych "Oceania My Dilemma III" (1984) has that form in each of three dark canvases. An aboriginal mask looms frighteningly over the central panel, above the fallen Alba form. Ideas and passions collide in the brilliant, dark "Oceania." The aborigine slaughters the iconic figure from Western art history, which may also represent the artist himself, not to mention the door, the spiritual transformation, to which Christ refers.

Alba turns up again in "Rejection" (1986-1996), red in the background behind a soldier in a World War I-era uniform, whose head is a sheep's skull: the soldier as lamb going to slaughter. Walker had family who fought in that war; the Alba again stands in for the artist, and his fiery commitment to create, linking creation to destruction.

Walker's iconography is rich and satisfyingly perplex. He's virtuosic with paint. The better the technique, the juicier the content a work can hold.

In recent years, he's left Alba behind to delve into the Maine landscape, and a loopy, voluptuous tide-pool shape has stepped in as his touchstone. It anchors the left corner of "Light and Forms" (2006), a bright and brawny canvas slashed with color.

Walker does not hold back from the joys and terrors of what it is to be human, and he's got the chops to express it meaningfully, without pathos. To see his work is to be reassured of one's own messy humanity.

Hidden identity
Stephen Barker's garrulous, encompassing, multilayered installation at Bernard Toale Gallery works like a good murder mystery. Barker picks up from the true story of a British-born spy for the Soviet Union, Guy Burgess, who was gay and whose life was shrouded in secrecy. Barker utilized the Freedom of Information Act to access FBI documents about Burgess, photocopies of which stud the exhibit.

He also dives into the coverups and moments of exposure inherent in being gay in the 1950s, wallpapering parts of the gallery with copies of old snapshots of gay bars from that era. He adds his own metaphoric flourish, pairing enlarged copies of blacked-out FBI documents with his own black-and-white photos of men exposing their tattooed torsos, but not their faces. Barker titles these images "Nine Bachelors: Guy Burgess in America," as if the men are the spy's anonymous lovers.

Moody portrait photographs taken by Barker look down on the viewer from high on the wall, both noir-ish and glamorous. Each print has been made with multiple negatives, so the men appear wall-eyed - looking in two directions - or in one instance, two-faced. Round glass bulbs with mirrored bottoms invite the viewer to peer in and view reflections of erotic snapshots from the 1950s affixed to the top of the bulbs - it's like looking at a peep show and into the mirror at the same time.

All these layers of imagery convey how shifty the truth can be, particularly when riddled with secrets, and perhaps especially when sexuality is thrown into the mix.