0.2 A LOVELY PARADOX

"The scientific simulations that interest me involve events that are not visible to the human eye... these images are not created with representative exactness in mind, for the events they depict may, in fact, have no definite structure." With this declaration Pedro Barbeito takes his place in a history reaching back towards classical mythology, and the artistic revelation of unseen phenomena in our universe. Barbeito's paintings unfold a lovely paradox about the power of the limits of observation. He quotes images of scientific simulations- of events occurring just beyond the boundary of observation -and thus the genre of naturalism, and yet they are nonetheless "real," an advanced version of Leonardo's conception of "sight and insight." "To an ever greater extent our experience is governed by pictures, pictures in newspapers and magazines, on television and in the cinema. Next to these pictures first hand experience begins to retreat, to seem more and more trivial. While it once seemed that pictures had the function of interpreting reality, it now seems that they have usurped it." When Douglas Crimp wrote those words in 1977 he described with passion and insight the terrain of a culture where models of representation had come to precede and define first hand experience. And it is on this point that Barbeito has commenced the re-inscription of reality inside scientific visualizations he recounts as paintings. They are indeed far from simulacral accounts, or a referential view of the universe. His paintings of scientific simulations of natural phenomena can do none other than speak in the first, rather than the second person, for they have become an acceptable level of the real by default: an experience otherwise unavailable. As ironic as it may sound, Barbeito's subjects conscientiously reverse Crimp's earlier and crucial insight: "the real" channeled by simulation has become more authentic than "representation."

0.3 ABSTRACTION IN OUTER SPACE

In the summer of 1054 A.D. Chinese astronomers were astonished by the arrival of a new star in the sky, so luminous that it was visible in broad daylight for weeks on end. Modern astronomers can see the Crab Nebula at the site of that bright star floating in space, 6,500 light-years from Earth. The Crab Nebula is the vestige of a star that began its life with a mass 10 times that of our Sun, that concluded on July 4, 1054 when it exploded into a supernova. The Crab Nebula: Two Neutron Stars Colliding is the title of one of Barbeito's recent paintings. Suspended between the accomplishments of hard science to truthfully visualize the universe, and its failure to actually fly us to its outer limits to see the Crab Nebula for ourselves, Barbeito's painting's status in the real sits undisputed. Why? Because there is no greater reality to appeal to. In this sense science, not art, has recovered the first iteration of "radical original experience" out of the entropic circumstances of postmodernity. Barbeito's realization in this is amongst his chief accomplishments.

Exhibited at Basilico Fine Arts, New York, 1999