I conceive of Barbeito's drafting of pure science -incidents of radical original experience- as an attempt to reconcile that experience with abstract art. In effect, he promotes art into a refreshed venue where pure abstraction can exist. So when he says to us that his "images are not created with representative exactness in mind, for the events they depict may, in fact, have no definite structure," he is speaking about abstract science and abstract art simultaneously. He has leveraged meaning back into abstraction. Barbeito's approach darts along the fringes of the history of abstraction's repudiation of art that imitates the natural world, to finally embrace something like Arthur Schopenhauer's insistence that art imitate the Platonic ideals, which lie behind perceived things, and not in their outward appearances. If this rings with nostalgia, or haunts one with pointless revivalism, it would be useful to reflect on Thomas Lawson's brilliant reconciliation of painting with the Pictures Culture Crimp described, when he wrote "Last Exit Painting" in the pages of Artforum twenty years ago. Barbeito nominates painting to make visible what is otherwise hidden, and what he chooses to make perceptible is wild, awe-inspiring, and grand. Indeed, it is not an infatuation to reflect on Barbeito's paintings of pure information -visualizations of dead stars, atomic structures, dark matter, and quarks- as an innovative and fresh declaration of abstract painting as Sublime.

0.4 TRANSCENDENT INFORMATION

Barbeito is committed to subjects that could fairly be called transcendent, subjects existing beyond perception, the sorts of themes that once inspired Friedrich, Turner, even Rothko. And timing is significant here, for it cannot be overlooked that his commitment arrives at a moment in history where we find ourselves further than Crimp and Lawson's media culture, and well inside the information age. I recall how Jack Burnham imagined this transition toward the information culture when he wrote: "In the automated state power resides less in the control of the traditional symbols of wealth than in information." Barbeito is trafficking in the imagery of the information culture, and therefore trafficking in its influence and power. As Jean Francois Lyotard wrote in his watershed report on knowledge titled The Postmodern Condition: "Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major, perhaps the major- stake in the worldwide competition for power," before concluding, "It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control of access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor." Lyotard offered a precis of our current cultural conditions and consciousness, which have ushered to the fore uncertainties about how the artworld would negotiate a relationship to the information culture, and express its continued relevance. How will painting sustain any magnitude in the age Burnham and Lyotard describe? Can information be Sublime? The answer begins by saying that a part of the power and influence Lyotard assigns to information will be philosophic and artistic.

Exhibited at Lehmann Maupin, New York, 2000