"The Conversation" is the loaded title of Pedro Barbeito's fifth solo show, and once the search is on, dialogue can be discerned everywhere in these ambitious paintings: between male and female, abstraction and figuration, disegno and pittura, the artist and art history. Gone are this Spanish-born, New York-based artist's references to astrophysics and chemical compounds, in favor of that parallel universe, the bedroom. In You & Me (94 by 122 inches, 2004-05), shards of greens, grays, pinks and blues, some modulated with an airbrush or spray gun, obfuscate but do not wholly conceal monstrous, flanking figures teetering on the brink of illegibility, stenciled in a pencil-thick, unraveling line that shifts in color from coffee to wine. The figure on the right is either gratifying or disemboweling himself; the figure on the left looks on askance.
Forgiveness (71 by 96 inches, 2004) eventually reveals a huddled pair of kneeling figures, praying hands and a bit of camouflage on the left; an ovoid grid like a mandala dominates the right, adorned with a jagged, parti-colored heart shape in high relief. A languorous odalisque lolls within the frenzied, fragmented Reclining Defiant II (69 by 83 inches, 2005), a paradigm of every artist's intention to lure the viewer into a state of perpetual desire, always tantalized and never satisfied. Its bristling thatch of black lines cut through with rods of electric blue, and the glassy, splintery background shoving its way forward, make this more spatially impenetrable than the other paintings.
But the drawings associated with it are among the most open of the 11 on view. Though studies for specific paintings, these drawings, in ink, pencil and running-dry felt marker, instantly recall Picasso's later graphics, bifurcated portrayals of painter and model wherein the master equates painting with sex even as he diagrams his distance from his conquest. Pictorial complexity is sketchily abbreviated in a lattice-work of notational marks, building toward an open architecture of lines in great variety, where form and void exchange identities in true Cubist fashion.
The largest, least chromatic and most iconographically diffuse of the paintings is The Conversation II (94 by 144 inches, 2004). In the related drawing, one figure peeks under the skirt of another, but in the painting such vivid narrative detail is subsumed among jagged wedges of pale secondary colors and pearly grays. Meticulously crafted areas of pale acrylic film, one in the shape of an angular, stretched question mark, force the issue of surface versus depth. Two contorted, poised figures can be made out, shouting at each other from above and below center. Behaving like professional wrestlers, they are artist and subject.
-- Stephen Maine, Art in America
"The Conversation" Exhibited at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, 2005
