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LYNDON BARROIS JR.
10 September – 24 October 2026
Alma Pearl, Unit T, Reliance Wharf, London
— Peter Bondanella, "Neorealist Aesthetics and the Fantastic: 'The Machine to Kill Bad People' and 'Miracle in Milan,' " Film Criticism , 3, no. 2 (Winter 1979), 26-27.
Alma Pearl is pleased to present Desert of Promise, an exhibition of new work by artist Lyndon Barrois Jr. (b. 1983, New Orleans, USA). This is the artist’s second solo presentation with the gallery and coincides with his solo exhibition at the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (USA). At Alma Pearl, Barrois Jr. reorients his focus toward the subject of time and the instruments through which it is captured. Taking as a point of departure the idea that magazines are always a reflection of their time, the new works consider the retroactive resonance of the past in the present moment, drawing from a collection of vintage National Geographic magazines that he acquired during a residency at the Jan van Eyck Academie in 2018.
Celestino, the protagonist of the neorealist Italian film directed by Roberto Rossellini La Macchina Ammazzaccattivi (The Machine to Kill Bad People, 1952), is a local photographer who is visited by a figure he takes to be a saint or patron (but turns out to be a demon), who gifts him a camera capable of killing bad people. As Celestino begins to use the apparatus, however, the distinction between good and evil rapidly collapses: everyone appears implicated, and no one is ultimately spared. The camera, only apparently an instrument for recording reality and producing objective knowledge, is in fact far from neutral.
Barrois Jr.'s suite of drawings in coloured pencil, each pulled from the same still depicting Celestino with his camera, operate less as illustrations of the film than as conceptual devices. In this sense, the drawings establish a central proposition of the exhibition: that nothing is quite what it seems, and that every system of representation contains the possibility of deception. Barrois Jr. similarly takes images and systems that seem to offer a means of knowing or ordering the world and exposes the logics embedded within them. What should function as a neutral device for depicting reality is transformed into an apparatus of interpretation and ultimately domination, violence, exploitation and power.
In New Worlds of Home, the cover of National Geographic that lends the title to the exhibition is mounted onto linen and presented within a Plexiglas box. On either side, navigation rulers and scale bars frame the image. These tools, associated with the modern explorer, are used to translate measurements on a map into distances in the physical world and are presented as conceptual hooks through the presentation. This arrangement turns the magazine into something between an archival specimen, a map and a display apparatus. The cover itself presents a familiar image of Egypt: pyramids rising from the desert, accompanied by accounts of Napoleon amongst other natural exotica. On its reverse, an advertisement for JVC equipment invokes the American astronaut Scott Carpenter, one of the Mercury Seven selected by NASA in 1959. Exploration here shifts seamlessly from the colonial landscape to technological modernity, from the archaeological past to consumer electronics and the conquest of outer space.
In the two collage and C-print framed works Untitled (The Eloquent Peasant) and Untitled (Gold Rush), both 2026, the donkey, drawn from two films belonging to different cinematic eras and cultural contexts, emerges throughout the exhibition as a recurring symbol. In the first work, a still from The Eloquent Peasant (Shadi Abdel Salam, Egypt, 1970) is juxtaposed with another page from the National Geographic magazine, featuring an article on expeditions into the Wahiba Sands alongside an advertisement for Rolex and the iconic Universal International logo. The accumulation of these images brings together cinema, travel, luxury and mass entertainment, placing the figure of the donkey against the visual language of exploration and consumption.
In the artist’s own words:
The donkey is both my mascot and timepiece. A sort of sundial that interrogates our sense of time's linearity. They have always been here, working. From Black Narcissus (1948) to Big Top Pee Wee (1988), the donkey has traversed time, geography and genre on screen, which echoes its condition as a laborious body around the world for millennia. The donkey is a transnational icon whose image has persisted in the periphery of civilization around the globe. Like watches, they are instruments of measurement that remain useful, not by changing themselves, but in how change over time is measured against them.
— Lyndon Barrois Jr., “Some Thoughts on Producing a Wand”, an essay produced for his solo exhibition Mirage Collar, Artists Space, New York, 2022)
The motif extends beyond the two framed works, appearing, for example, in the sculpture presented in an archival box, functioning almost as a prop within the narration at play, where the donkey becomes another fragment within the exhibition’s wider system of images, signs, references and classifications.
The show is also anchored by a series of sign paintings interpolated from Cyril Schäublin’s 2022 film Unrest. Set in a 19th-century Swiss factory populated by women watchmakers, the film explores themes of labour, anarchism, and connectivity within a period of pre-standardised timekeeping. The factory signs, translated from the Swiss French original, read, “Be brief, your time is as precious as ours,” conjuring questions of urgency and prompting reflection on to whom—and to what—we are accountable in relation to our time, labor, and efforts.
The exhibition can be understood, once again, as an investigation into representation and its entanglement with Capitalism, resource extraction and exploitation across time. Photography is not simply a technology for recording the world; it is part of the machinery through which the world has been made visible, classified and made available for Western consumption. In the pages of National Geographic, the camera has generated an intense fetishistic value around travel and luxury consumption, which become modern counterparts to the colonial and Western values that historically shaped their representation. The world here is presented as something to be discovered, consumed and possessed.