Since the 1990s, Walton Ford has been retrospectively caught up in the nineteenth century’s obsession with nature, back when the mountains were crawling with lions, and the sky was full of birds. His new series “Barbary,” on display at Kasmin’s new gallery in Chelsea, is a study of the Barbary lion. Ford is never interested merely in the natural world, but in the way humans have documented, exploited, and repurposed it, and how these species have been mythologized, even as most of them have disappeared from the wild. Ford makes paintings of paintings of animals.
