I've given particular attention to the work of Lewitt, Bochner, and Close because, as the oldest and best-established artists in this group, they've left a strong mark on the entire project. Perhaps that becomes clearer when their work is compared to that of the youngest artists in the show, Tara Donovan and Pedro Barbeito. Curious and paradoxical relations between information or systems and materials inform their work too, but in different and perhaps more tacit ways...While Donovan's work may appear to emphasize materials (yet turns out to reflect on information as well), Barbeito's, contrariwise, seems dominated by information, for which the work's material aspect is merely a secondary presentational necessity; likewise, appearances are deceiving. Ivestigations into the PHYSICS & TECHNOLOGY OF QUANTUM-CONFINED MOLECULAR & ELECTRONIC DEVICES - the title of a recent painting, from a series directly related to the prints Barbeito made with Two Palms - gives the flavor of his subject matter: information gathered from astronomical research translated into visual form. But a strange confounding of the categories happens as a result. The positive- negative dualism of digital information - that endless series of ones and zeros - not only reveals itself as an essential material differnece (here, the distinction between white and black) but moreover as essentially a series of imprints upon an underlying material (in this case, paper). Perhaps, then, the relation information/material corresponds to the relation digital/analog, but the important thing to keep in mind is the way art (and not only art) keeps reminding us that nothing is ever simply digital or analog, information or material, all the way through. What is analog at one level turns out to be digital at another and vice-versa. Information is an underlying condition of matter, matter the ground of information. That's a realization that comes just as easily from Terry Winters' series GRAPHIC PRIMITIVES, 1998, as it does from Barbeito's work...

-- Barry Schwabsky

Exhibited in "Under Pressure: Prints from Two Palms Press" (Traveling show 2001-2003)