Pedro BARBEITO -

Press release

Jean-Luc and Takako Richard are pleased to present a selection of Pedro Barbeito’s paintings made in  2007.

Barbeito’s work examines the relationship between digital image-making and painting. By exploring their connections, he reveals new ways in which painting can challenge the ways in which we understand and process images. The artist mixes different techniques of painting and on each canvas and you can see a variety of textures. His figurative representations with sharp lines and strong contrasts can be compared to wooden engravings by German expressionnists, suggesting a strong dramatic intensity. These present volatile worlds being digitally represented, we can also find other fragmented images and some lost pixels floating in space. These varied elements don’t tell us a story but pieces of stories in which violence appears in its historical continuity.

His paintings are vertical or horizontal ovals They are completely saturated by many pieces of information, abstract and figurative images mixed together. It seems that the  oval space of these paintings is absorbing all our visual world. We can also imagine that time is compressed as historical and contemporary images get superimposed.

Pedro Barbeito, a New York-based painter, was born in La Coruña, Spain in 1969 and received his MFA in painting from Yale University. Barbeito’s work has been exhibited at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, and Exit Art among others.  He is a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award.