DIALOGUES FOR A NEW MILLENNIUM - PEDRO BARBEITO

Pedro Barbeito. The conversation, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 71” x 85”.

A Conversation with Paco Barragán

Spanish-Greek painter based in New York Pedro Barbeito Marulis kicks off a series of on-going interviews focused on change and innovation in contemporary artistic practices, and the desire of giving visibility to fresh and challenging voices. A student of Mel Bochner, Barbeito Marulis studied at Brandeis, Skowhegan and Yale, respectively. Since his first solo show with Basilico Fine Arts in 1999, his pictorial practice has evolved in a very consistent manner to reflect –through its different stages– painting’s “state of the art” and its contradictory relationship with contemporary visual culture. Pedro likes to paint, and, especially, to reflect critically about painting.

Paco Barragán -There are far too many images. Quantity has defeated quality in our visual and consumer culture, and horror vacui seems to be the guiding principle. Not only the past but also the present is constantly re-oriented and re-enacted. Do images still hold any claim to truth in your opinion?

Pedro Barbeito Marulis -From the beginning of history people have been trying to represent the world through pictures. Before photography, painting was the principal medium with which the world and its history were documented. We are all well aware of the liberties taken by artist and patron in that regard. The images left behind are what now define those moments in time. It only makes sense that photography would follow suit. Photography was initially seen as a more factual way of recording the world, the representation resulting from a chemical process. It turns out that from its inception, photography has been used to manipulate reality; there was the initial belief that photographs were factual documents, allowing for the ruse to progress more easily. In our daily lives we attempt to change our appearance so we may look more attractive, less attractive, younger, more threatening, thinner… Photography is an extension of how we want to see the world and how we desire to be seen in it.

The overflow and saturation of imagery in our current information age has only added to the competitive side of image making - how does one capture the attention of an audience? Whether it’s the news, entertainment or selling cosmetics, one has to try to visually differentiate oneself from one’s competition in order to maintain interest. Online this involves static images competing with moving images. The ads in magazines and newspapers that we once half glanced at or skipped entirely are now mobile online and even come at us with sound; a form of virtual Times Square, where every square inch of pixilated space competes, with lights and music, for our attention.

We can look at images of the war in Iraq in The New York Times and we can also look at different images of the same incidents on the Al Jazeera website. This cross examining of events and of commercial products that’s available to us allows for a greater truth than was available 50 years ago; we end up just having to search deeper for it.

DIGITAL FORMAT AND AESTHETIC CHANGE

P.B. -But all this excess heavily mediates the way we see, think, and behave, affecting you as an artist in your artistic practice. The way you receive, manipulate, and distribute images is totally new and ever-changing: from 3-D programs, I-Phones, to Youtube, Flickr, or Google Earth…

P.B.M. -Yes, this technological excess is now at the very center of every artist’s practice, from finding images as resource material to making a website to mailing images to collectors and galleries.

The other side of this digital moment that some artists are confronting is how it affects the presentation and language of the work itself. How does the digital format and aesthetic change and redefine the artist’s use of forms in his or her paintings and the use of the painting medium? I got very interested in using computer software programs as a tool for making paintings back in 1995 when I took a 2-D/3-D digital image-making architecture class (there were no computer art classes back then) while at the Yale School of Art. Almost immediately after taking the class, a lot of the work that I was doing on paper I replaced by drawing on the computer. Plugging in colors and changing shapes had never been easier. After becoming somewhat proficient in using these programs, I noticed that though the process of creation was completely different than painting, the images I was making resembled the paintings in my studio. Finding a bridge between these two very different processes of creation and presenting these meshed processes as the content of the painting seemed interesting. I tried to display the steps taken in creating digital forms through analogous applications of the paint medium.

I discovered the full potential of this medium when I got out of school and purchased my own computer. That’s when I began to fully use the computer in my process, from downloading images, to manipulating them, to translating them on canvas in acrylic paint and integrating them with 2-D and 3-D printed images on canvas.

P.B. -In this sense, we could speak of two clearly delimited phases in the use of the Internet, tools like Photoshop, scanners and other gadgets in contemporary art practices: in the mid 90s there was a formalist interest in technology as a novelty; in the new decade we see a shift towards a more political and social use of technology. This break is something that we can clearly experience in your work if we compare your first images of stellar births, black holes and molecular structures, and more recent work like the series “Us and Them.”

P.B.M. -When I got out of school in 1996 and came to NY, the world was a relatively stable place, the economy was good and the US was a safe haven untouched by modern terror or war. The subject of my work at the time was the phenomenon of this new digital technology in relation to painting. I was using pigment printouts and stereo lithography models within the paintings to speak to and to create a contrast with painting’s history of representation as well as its tactile physical nature. The scientific images I downloaded and used as forms in my paintings were completely new; they were images that could only be made visible through technology, depicting black holes, stellar births, dark matter, etc. Since I assembled the representations of these phenomena from various forms of data - through gravitational readings and images taken in various wavelengths of light - it appealed to me that they had no standardized visual definition. Depending on the data gathered, the representation looked different. They were in a way shape shifters. In the paintings I was making, I tried to incorporate as many semblances of the phenomena as possible. A case could be made that my paintings were therefore the most accurate representations of these phenomena, as they held the most data. This made me think more about how we see things and define them, which I guess speaks to your first question about “truth.”

The shift to the more political happened naturally. In the early part of this decade, I moved from using scientific imagery to imagery of violence that I was seeing in video games. The Playstation and Game Cube consoles had just come out and the graphics were light years ahead of what game systems had been visually providing before. The detailed worlds looked familiar yet, due to the technology, the colors and warping of the forms/figures in the games were unique. The realism of the violence I saw in a lot of the games explained their popularity. A virtual beating up of your foe - everyone could now be a bully, thug or action hero. I downloaded stills from these games and juxtaposed them with art historical images of similar subjects. My goal was to make paintings by breaking down these two kinds of images into pixels and vector lines – to deconstruct them using a digital language on the computer – and then using that outcome to reconstruct them on canvas using applications of paint that referred to and held the aesthetic of the digital. The outcomes seemed odd and visually new to me since they were painted and spoke to painting, yet had the look and feel of a digital space.

Around the same time 9/11 occurred and suddenly images of war and devastation started pouring into our televisions and online as never before, and everyone with a digital camera or video recorder and access to the Internet could report on the war. Beheadings, explosions and death had a new and devastating face. Due to the graphic content, some of the images were displayed in lower resolutions; some were censored; the quality of others suffered due to the type of camera used. How and why these images were or were not being distributed and the possibility of finding other truths/realities of what was happening through alternate websites (ogrish.com was one I used) and foreign news websites became interesting to me. My series of paintings “Us and Them” (2005-2007) came out of all this a few years later.

NEW CLASSICISM AND TECHNO-REFERENTIALITY

P.B. Painting is surely back after its retreat in the 90s. On the other hand it’s back in the guise of a “new classicism” -as keenly pointed out by critics like David Lillington and Benjamin Buchloh-: Leipzig and Dresden School, Neo Rauch, Peter Doig… How do you interpret this particular pictorial Zeitgeist?

P.B.M. -It is fascinating that painting has made a comeback in the past decade with its most traditional guise in 100 years, especially seeing as we just went through a century of a conceptual art practice. In my opinion the foremost reason is the rise in status of collectors in the art world: money basically pushing out the critic as decider and installing an aesthetic of accessibility. Inflating the prices of artists’ work at auction markets so as to protect their investment, choosing which institutions/museums to fund, and dealers needing to cater to collectors’ tastes to pay for their galleries ever-higher overheads are some of the reasons for this empowerment.

It’s a shame though that the achievements and struggles of the twentieth century have been put aside for an easier narrative. Studying the unfolding of art in the twentieth century and finding/looking for some way forward through the maze of ideas laid down requires time and devotion as many an artist, art historian and critic know.

P.B. -In this sense, we could use the concept “Techno-Referentiality”: a context in which painting measures itself against its own history and myths, while at the same time it deploys interdisciplinary and digital approaches. See, for example, Mariana Vassileva’s moving painting “The Milkmaid” inspired by Vermeer, or Sam Taylor-Wood’s “A Still Life”inspired by a painting by Pontormo. Your work also has clear historical references like Velazquez and Picasso.

P.B.M. -It’s important for me to make these connections between painting’s history of representation and contemporary technological and cultural forms of presenting imagery, just as I imagine it was for Velazquez and Picasso. If you look at Velazquez’s paintings, you realize how aware he was of how vision works; it was almost scientific. The blurring and focusing of imagery, from how one form mysteriously blends into another form when looked at close up to how they separate and come into focus when looked at from a distance. When I first saw his paintings in person at the Prado museum in the mid 90s, they reminded me of how one can abstract and focus an image by zooming in and out using Photoshop. In his work “Las Hilanderas” from 1656, parts of the painting almost look abstract; the blur he creates through a section of the image is not dissimilar from the effects you can attain using certain filters in Photoshop. The paintings are technically masterful and are all about how we see and can interpret things in 2-D. Picasso’s work is similar in that he was also reinterpreting the way we see, whether it was through using the model of African sculpture as an alternate way of seeing and representing or through attempting to portray an image from multiple perspectives - Cubism. Without a doubt these are artists who would have examined in depth the potential of technology and computers as tools for painting.

With my Picasso series of paintings (2003-2006), I literally tried to recreate his studio practice, using my wife as a muse and making multiple drawings of her from various perspectives in a style reminiscent of Picasso. These I scanned into my computer and superimposed in Photoshop. Some drawings were simplified into flat planes of color using Photoshop; others were left in their linear state. The resulting digital compositions were then translated to paint on canvas. The resulting paintings hold an aesthetic that lies somewhere between the digital and Cubism. Velazquez I used in an earlier group of paintings where I downloaded images of his paintings from art history and superimposed them in Photoshop with stills from video games. These were then translated to paint on canvas. The crisper, acidic colored pixilated images of video games combined with the blurred warmer colors of Velazquez and the medium of painting.

THE PIXEL AND ABSTRACTION-FIGURATION DEBATE

P.B. -This brings us to another key element in your pictorial practice: the expansion of the limits between abstraction and figuration. The pixel is restaging this debate in a totally new context: how the non-referentiality of abstraction relates to a low resolution pixilated image, and the referentiality of representation to high resolution images.

P.B.M. - A few hundred years ago artists realized that the medium of paint applied with a brush could represent a figure without painting every limb, hair and tone of flesh. The tone of color used and the way the brush was pressed to the canvas could be enough to express the shape and believability of a human form as seen from a distance. Look at any old master’s painting with figures in a deep space – Goya is a good example. Even Rembrandt’s portraits take liberties with the associations we make between forms in painting and reality. The face is painted with the most incredible detail creating a reality even more powerful than a photo. Seurat delved into the scientific and made up his own rules of how light defined form by building up his paintings using small dots of color (reminiscent of pixels). These kinds of decision-making would in the twentieth century lead to the disappearance of the traditional figure-ground relationship in exchange for the representation of ideas and concepts. Geometric shapes, organic shapes, monochrome painting, process painting, the puncturing of the surface of the canvas… and their implications as subject matter replaced the figure. All this expanded the vocabulary that painting had to communicate with.

The abstracting of representation in painting is at the center of all painting from its inception to today. The multiplicity of meanings that mark-making and forms have acquired over time plays perfectly into this digital moment where a completely new process and language have entered and dominated the world of making images.

All the paintings I’ve made have represented factual visual information; what compels me is that they looked abstract. We are becoming more and more dependant on technology to see the universe we live in. Its format of presentation redefining the shapes and forms we’ve become accustomed to. The pixel interested me for being the building block of digital imagery and for how it spoke to art history. Malevich’s square was never mistaken for a pixel, nor were Mondrian’s geometric paintings. Today you paint a square and it automatically refers to a pixel as well as to a shape, a unit, a box, etc. How the grid has changed and acquired meanings throughout art history is also fascinating. Today a grid can also refer or be used as the grid of pixels on one’s monitor, a minimalist grid or a renaissance grid. With my early paintings from 1996 to 2001, I exclusively used grids and pixels to define my forms. I would split large oval canvases (that related to the shape of the universe) into gridded quadrants that revolved around a central point in the canvas – a one-point perspective grid. The top left grid holds the lowest resolution grid and so the image plotted into that grid looks the most abstract. This was painted in with the thickest paint. So, a physical shape, a very shallow box sits in one of the gridded squares. The top right quadrant holds the highest resolution image and the image is copied pixel by pixel into this grid painted using the flattest of colors. This quadrant looks the most like the resource material. The center of the canvas (there’s a separate panel sitting in the center of the paintings) holds a pigment printout of a high-resolution depiction of the source material I transcribed using software programs. In this central panel no squares/pixels are visible. That it’s a printout is enough evidence that pixels are being used. These relationships keep the viewer redefining what the image is about, the evidence on the canvas ranging from the somewhat familiar to the unknown. What keeps me engaged is the ability of the forms to mutate and transform within this newly expanded language of painting, so providing multiple meanings and directions for future work to go in.

P.B. Finally, what can painting offer in our media-driven society?

P.B.M. Painting offers the deceleration of how we see and interpret images and a reminder of the beauty and history behind them. In today’s media-driven society an image exists for a few seconds; it’s ephemeral; we see it and we discard it. Painting’s longevity conflated with its static immediacy speaks perfectly to all this. At least it leaves us with the question of how and why we look at these images. What are they really providing that’s of value.

P.B. -Thank you for your time.

Paco Barragán is an independent curator and an arts writer based in Madrid. He is curatorial advisor to the Artist Pension Trust (APT), New York. Some of the shows he has curated most recently are “The Non-Age,” Kunsthalle Winterthur, Winthertur, June-July 2009; “Marc Bijl. Arrested Development” (co-curated with Javier Panera), Domus Artium 2 (DA2), Salamanca, April-September 2009. He is author of The Art to Come, 2002, Subastas Siglo XXI, The Art Fair Age, 2008, CHARTA, and editor of Sustainabilities, 2008, CHARTA, a series of essays by leading contemporary thinkers such as Slavoj Zizek, Simon Critchley and Gilles Lipovetsky.