ARTslant Interview

Bradley Rubenstein August 2012

Pedro Barbeito’s exhibition at The Aldrich, Pop Violence, presents a series of work ranging from 2005 to the present that are based on images of war taken primarily from the world news media. For Barbeito, these works address the formative role of violence in contemporary life, from a political ethos driven by “terror” and deception, to the aesthetics of visual assault prevailing in popular culture. They draw upon the anxieties of an age when we are afforded, primarily through the Internet, unprecedented visual access to the violence of war and political strife. The complexity of the differing treatment of the various layers and textures, combined with new visuals—some of them computer-generated diagrams, pixelation, patterns, grids, ambiguous forms, confusing plays between foreground and background, surface and depth, fragmented compositions, and striking colors—all contribute to works of uncanny beauty.