H igh and low don’t exist for Alvaro Barrington and Róisín Tapponi, at least in the traditional sense. As we settle into the couple’s favorite local wine bar in De Beauvoir Town, a tucked-away London neighborhood where north and east begin to blur, their references ricochet across disciplines and centuries. “I think the only artwork that really beats the Sistine Chapel is ‘Thriller,’” asserts Barrington of the 1982 Michael Jackson classic. Tapponi, meanwhile, grew up seeking out experimental films online yet somehow reached adulthood without having seen “Home Alone.” At the heart of their relationship is a shared instinct: they think across categories rather than within them.
With a practice long rooted in painting and a career that has also included periods teaching in art schools, Barrington makes his case with persuasive ease. He describes the Black cultural production that shaped him, from the 1960s to the early 2000s, as an era of creative achievement “only matched by the Italian Renaissance,” with a pantheon stretching across music, television and popular culture. “Nobody had the power to change what people talked about for the next 24 hours like Oprah Winfrey in the ’90s,” he reflects. “We’re still living in the conceptual ideas of sharing, of identity, and all of that. That’s an Oprah Winfrey invention.”
His enthusiasm for one tradition, however, does not require the demotion of another. Later, comparing 50 Cent’s album “Get Rich or Die Tryin’” with the work of Leonardo, he is quick to quip: “I love the Mona Lisa as well.”
Born in Caracas, Venezuela, to a Grenadian mother and Haitian father, and raised first in the Caribbean and then in Brooklyn, Barrington studied at Hunter College, New York City, before moving to London for an MFA at the Slade, graduating in 2017. “Culture is the primary thing that shapes lives,” he says emphatically.
“If you took two brothers living in the same house in the same bedroom, if one is a Taylor Swift fan and the other an Arsenal fan, then they have nothing in common.”
The Arsenal supporter may share more formative memories with fellow fans in China, Indonesia or Argentina than with the brother beside him. Barrington has a term for these groupings: “culture states,” overlapping worlds defined by the references through which their inhabitants understand their lives.
Writer and curator Tapponi arrives at a similar idea through London. Born in Ireland, she moved to the English capital aged 6. “My mum’s Irish. My dad’s Iraqi—my family are Assyrian, which is an Indigenous ethnic group from Iraq. You can have a whole other experience of London on one street, depending on who you are, what your background is, what class you are, who you know, who your people are,” she says.
Tapponi studied comparative literature and later art history at University College London. A formative encounter with Mona Hatoum’s 1988 video work “Measures of Distance” helped steer her toward film programming. Alongside her studies, she founded Habibi Collective, which presents women’s film and video from Southwest Asia and North Africa through screenings in London and internationally. In 2020, when Covid closed the physical spaces in which she had been working, she created Shasha Movies, an online streaming platform dedicated to cinema and artists’ films from those regions. Both reflect a preference she shares with Barrington for answering underrepresentation by building new structures rather than simply critiquing those already in place.
I n October, Tapponi’s debut novel, “Scene City,” appeared from Verso Books, the independent left-wing publisher, and drew praise for its wit and formal ambition. It follows Romy, an art history student moving through gallery openings, parties and friendships in London as she tries to find a purpose—and eventually begins writing a book of her own. The art-world setting came naturally. “It was just my environment,” she says. But “Scene City” is less a portrait of a fixed milieu than of finding your place within one. She began writing it at 21, when she was still entering the world it describes. Six years later, Tapponi says, “I feel like I’m still kind of in the same world that I was entering into when I started writing the book.”
She is careful, however, to distinguish between details borrowed from life and self-portraiture. “The most interesting autobiographical element is the emotional truths that I talk about in the book,” she says. The surface details may cross over—a J.W. Anderson pigeon bag damaged in the novel bears the very same ding as her own—but she is unequivocal about her protagonist: “She’s a fictional character.”
“None of my family on either side read books, but they are so literary,” Tapponi says of her family’s oral storytelling tradition. “For thousands of years literature was not the novel tradition.” “Scene City,” though, had a more immediate catalyst: the death of her Irish grandfather, Philip Coogan. After his business was destroyed in a bombing during the Troubles, Coogan turned to writing, recording his life in an effort to seek justice. His literary ambitions also took a more absurd turn, Tapponi recalls. He started a book about a horse that breaks its ankle. “And then my uncle goes, ‘Horses don’t have ankles.’ And that put an end to the book.”
The result is a novel that is densely allusive, with literary references to Irish novelist Flann O’Brien and Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, alongside nods to the coronation of King Charles III, Britpop band Pulp and the distinctly British controversy over politician MP Diane Abbott drinking a canned mojito on London public transport. Tapponi delights in citing an early review that describes the book as “masterfully” conflating “Ulysses” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary.”
“I’m formed by these references more than I am formed by anything else,” she says. “I’m Gen Z; how we communicate is so particular. I was trying to figure out: How does Gen Z communicate? How does that look in the modern novel? Not just that someone uses a phone, but in terms of vibe, doomscrolling, short sentences, shorter-length sentences, slang—all of it is in the book, and in the form.” On the page, clipped sentences accumulate into a distinctive rhythm that the reader has to learn. “I don’t think it has a plot. What drives it forward is the language—its vibe,” Tapponi says. When I suggest a connection to the formal experiments of Irish modernism, she widens the lineage. “Postmodernism is equally as important,” she says, citing B.S. Johnson and Laurence Sterne. Barrington chimes in, observing that the ambition was to make something that “felt like it was now, but moving literature forward.”
B arrington’s practice has also been evolving, while continuing to draw on family, place and personal memory. Over the past two years, he has worked on an increasingly monumental scale, from his 2024 Tate Britain Commission, “GRACE,” to “Labor Day Parade ’91,” an installation in this year’s Venice Biennale that revisits memories of Brooklyn’s West Indian Day Parade. November 2026 brings another major public project. For “Western Beef–High Line,” a commission on the High Line in Manhattan, overlooking 14th Street, he turns to the warehouse-style supermarket chain by the same name whose orange sign and cowboy-hatted cactus are a familiar part of the city’s visual language.
As a child, Barrington would go there with his cousin, entering the refrigerated meat section through hanging plastic strips. In the new work, colored versions of the material replace the commercial vinyl across the face of a steel billboard. The polychrome strips create a translucent field in place of a conventional image. Facing west, “Western Beef” takes on the 19th-century landscape traditions of the Hudson River School, which made the waterway an emblem of American promise. He describes those painters as imagining “the possibility of the land” in a young nation. At sunset, light will pass through the strips, creating an effect Barrington has described as contemporary “stained glass” and placing supermarket plastic and Hudson River School grandeur on equal terms. The title riffs on hip-hop vernacular and the contested state of U.S. politics. “America is having this war with itself right now about what the role of the immigrant means,” Barrington says.
Barrington’s appetite for other people’s work can be obsessive. When Laura Owens, who had given critiques at Hunter College while he was studying there, later showed with art dealer Sadie Coles during his first year in London, he saw the exhibition 12 times. Owens subsequently told Coles to look out for him. The dealer came to his Slade degree show and soon asked him to work with her. By then Barrington was also in conversation with the galleries Corvi-Mora and Emalin, and rather than select just one, he decided to join all three. “I had different ideas for what I could do with each of them,” he says. “And they said, ‘Yeah, let’s try.’ The people I work with love art,” he says.
“I only make art because I’m serious about my feelings,” he reflects. After a difficult previous relationship ended, he found films about infidelity almost unbearable. For Barrington, those reactions are part of what art is for. “So then I go and I make paintings to deal with that,” he says. “Art is messy because life is messy.” The same tolerance for complication shapes how the couple look at broader creative outputs. “We remove that morality, and we just ask, ‘What’s interesting?’” Barrington says. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 “The Gospel According to St. Matthew,” made by a gay Marxist filmmaker, is Tapponi’s favorite film about Jesus. A poster Barrington gave her hangs in the room where she writes.
That emotional force is not confined to painting. Fashion is another shared field of reference. Both grew up around women with a strong sense of style. “They were resourceful; they just had a natural style,” Tapponi says of their mothers and grandmothers. At Pieter Mulier’s final Alaïa show, Barrington watched women cry over clothes that had articulated something they recognized in themselves. It sent him back to his own medium. “I don’t know the last time a painting met contemporary culture that way,” he says. “I need to make that. I need to do that.”
F or all the references they carry with them, neither is looking backward. “I think we’re both really interested in moving art forward and making it feel like it’s something that happens today,” Barrington says, “but it also could sit next to art from 200 years ago or 500 years ago.”
They have been together since 2021, and place has become one way of understanding each other. Barrington says he has come to know London through Tapponi. Spending time together in New York, she recalls seeing him “in his natural habitat” and thinking, “You make so much sense in a different way.” The home they share is subject to the same kind of thinking. They recently bought a sculptural foam sofa by artist and designer duo Kristen Wentrcek and Andrew Zebulon, after encountering their work about five years ago and obsessing over it ever since. Tapponi is drawn to its eccentricity—she likes what Barrington calls “beautiful odd things”—while his requirement is more practical. “I love comfort,” he says. That negotiation continues through the home, as they consider the objects they live with and how the spaces should work around them. “Every possibility of how we live is open for us to think through,” Barrington says. His studio is elsewhere, while Tapponi’s library—her “cave”—is at home. That shared environment may be an ongoing project, but everything around them suggests the larger story lies ahead. Barrington sees it more simply. “We just started.”
