Barbeito's paintings may be beautiful, but they stand for what it means to make expression sublime within the current culture. As archaic and intractable as his language may sound today Kant, in his Critique of Judgment, makes a vital distinction where Barbeito's art is concerned.

But the most important and vital distinction between the sublime and beautiful is certainly this: that if, as is allowable, we here confine our attention in the first instance to the sublime in Objects of nature (that of art always being restricted by conditions of an agreement with nature), we observe that whereas natural beauty (such as is self-subsisting) conveys a finality in its form making that the object appear, as it were, preadapted to our judgment, so that it thus forms of itself an object of our delight, that which, without our indulging in any refinements of thought, but, simply in our apprehension of it, excites the feeling of the sublime, may appear indeed, in point of form to contravene the ends of our power of judgment, to be ill-adapted to our faculty of presentation, and to be, as it were, an outrage on the imagination, and yet it is judged all the more sublime on that account.

Precisely because of what Barbeito paints, and how he paints it, his art sits beyond, and immune to "preadapt-ed judgment" because every preceding experience fails when we begin to pronounce what we may be seeing in his pictures. How to feel something for the natural .beauty inherent in the collision of stars when you have never seen stars collide? The grand elliptical shape of The Crab Nebula: Two Neutron Stars Colliding, 2000 is a window into the universe. Its elaborate composition, situated around an inner focus, containing a dense spi-raling cosmological atmosphere, encrusted with digital debris, somehow brings to mind Gian Paolo Lomazzo's spectacular Glory of Angels, 1570 at St. Marco in Milan. S.J. Freedberg describes Lomazzo's painting saying ". . . the mere hyperbole creates an effect of astonishment." This too could be said of Barbeito's pic-ture. And it can be said that the Nebula painting quiv-ers with an inconceivable cataclysm rising from a counterpoint of pictorial rhythms and sci-fi colors set within an impression of infinite space and infinite speed reminiscent of what Stanley Kubrick created out of the astronaut's psychedelic journey in 2001. But in the end, mere description disappoints.

Standing before the Nebula picture, one might literally be left in awe, or perhaps in a state of Edmund Burke's "terror," which was, to his mind, the overriding effect of the Sublime. Burke's view of painting and the Sublime applies here: "... a judicious obscurity in some things contributes to the effect of the picture, because in art as in nature, dark confused, uncertain images have greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions than those which are clear and determinate." And yet, Barbeito's swirling, pixilated diagrams are "real" and precise accounts of an actual stellar apocalypse that took place nine hundred and forty six years ago. Barbeito's pictures are in and of themselves, hybrids of the explicit and the hallucinatory, expressions, or per-haps better said, visualizations of the power of the lim-its of observation. Along this path, his art has begun to trace a form of the transcendent in the information age.

One account of Barbeito's paintings would say that they aspire to supercede powers of judgment, to effect an "outrage on the imagination." Simply said, the effect means to hurl us beyond the limits of our mind's eye to glide just ahead of experience. And to accomplish this he has chosen majestic occasions opening up "natural-ism" to the possibility of existing beyond observation, and returned with it to abstract painting, to nest it there. When we look into Barbeito's paintings it is not pure science that we survey, nor pure abstraction, but an artistic revelation of forces at work in our universe.

--Ronald Jones, New York City