WORKING PROOF
Pedro Barbeito
Rosat, Sampex, Asca, Beppo Sax, Chandra, and CGRO (2000), two sets of six relief prints, one on white paper and the other on black, paper, with embossment, engraving, collage, and inkjet, in an edition of ten plus two artist's proofs. Each print measures 15x21 in. (oval) and was printed on handmade Twinrocker paper by the artist and David Lasry at Two Palms Press in New York (the black paper was also dyed at Two Palms). At Pedro Barbeito's recent (late fall 2000) exhibition at Lehmann Maupin, the artist showed huge oval mixed-media paintings and these smaller prints—all imaginative attempts to visualize the unvisualizable. Barbeito's take is spun of largely abstract theory from the realms of physics and the digital—and painting titles like Dark Matter, A Non-Baryonic Structure and The Early Universe and the First Atomic Structures give some idea of the heady material with which Barbeito deals. The prints are named for satellites and present in visual syntax bits of information Barbeito supposes they gather and deploy. The prints are quite technically ambitious, created from a translucent plastic relief plate inked according to a map placed beneath; handmade paper with other elements adhered to it is then sandwiched between the plate and a die the artist has created; finally, the whole is run through the hydraulic press at enormous pressure. As a result, the oval works are actually concave and are meant to bend out from the wall. The imagery is a grid of raised lines that grow to progressively higher relief as they near the edge; some of the vectors are inked, others left blind. At the very center is a small color digital print in bleary pixilation that oscillates as you look at it. Each print could, indeed, be an eye looking back at your own, seeing something others have heretofore only imagined.