John Yau reviews John Walker: Looking Out to Sea at Alexandre Gallery, New York, on view through December 22, 2015.

Yau writes that "[Walker] embraces the obdurate world of mud and dissipation – the changing seasons of Seal Point, with its bracing tides, cold sunlight and washed up trash and debris. From the jagged stripes to the vibrating patterns to the clashing forms to the gritty surfaces, everything in these paintings has been lived intensely. Such passion has nothing to do with the prevailing narratives of art, and its preference for bluster and irony, but it does have a lot to do with painting, and why I, for one, go to Walker’s paintings to get the news of what it means to be alive in an indifferent universe."