{enter gallery above} Pedro Barrios is a street artist. When the thirty one year old Miami native visits a new place where he culls some new inspiration or love, he leaves some of his paintings behind, on the street, as a kind of sacramental offering. Barrios’ work is a bit folkloric. It has some roots in native cultures in the way that a great people explain their world in their indigenous and shared ways: through simple colors and shapes. Sometimes meaning occurs in the subtleties of a wind shift or the colors of the skies. Sometimes there’s no more meaning necessary than to acknowledge that wind, that color. Pedro Barrios’ work would look good on tipis, on leathers, on drums. On the unpaved street to the uncharted frontier of the west. On the warpath. In so many ways, Barrios’ work is the antithesis of street art. But it was the values of this ambiguous genre that led him to find his love for painting in the first place. Barrios had been drawing and painting since he was a child but it was his relationships with some artists in Europe, during his twenties, that inspired him to create the kind of work that he has been, for the last many years. Barrios was inspired to create accessible work. He doesn’t believe in loading his work with hidden meaning. Often, there’s really no meaning at all to be had apart from a panel’s aesthetic impact. Barrios’ paints on wood panels. He likes the repetition in pattern. It mimics his style. Sometimes his pieces end-up as a square. A lot of time they end-up on a circular pane. Always, they start-out as circles in conception. His work is tedious. He spends hours upon hours painting the same shapes, with the same colors. Some pieces will need 350 coats of paint. Still, there is tremendous satisfaction for Barrios – in these acts, in these final products of his. He is not fond of keeping his work. Just as he leaves some of it behind on his trips, he likes to gift his work to strangers. Sometimes that’s only through his tremendously low price points. When he closes a show, he doesn’t like to take any of his pieces with him. He doesn’t catalog his pieces by photographing his pieces for memory. Sometimes he enter a person’s home to see one of his pieces hanging on their walls. Each time he’s surprised: to see it on somebody’s wall but also to be reminded that even his work feels good to him. Perhaps this is the sole reason why Barrios paints at all: because he likes the aesthetics. He enjoys the meditation in the process. He likes the end product. And, explicitly, he is part of a long tradition of artists that create their work by hand. Barrios could employ a computer and resultantly take away all the hours of agonizingly tedious work – but that’s why he enjoys his final pieces: because they are created by hand. Since he was a kid, he has always drawn. This is a more refined version of that continued work. In each of his pieces, Barrios can spot the blemishes. In this, he can see his own hand – the ages of work that brought him to a final product. It is the image of the working artist, uncertain about how to be a booster for his own work so he instead he just continues to be a fan of his work from afar: Pedro Barrios is satisfied and inspired by what art is – both his and that which he walks into on his journeys around the globe. |