Friday, October 18, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Reversing Field

Bart Exposito's artwork has a feel of the past

Bart Exposito's exhibit at Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery is a futuristic look at the 1960s.

While that may sound like a contradictory statement, Exposito's art easily would look right at home in the living room of "The Jetsons."

The 31-year-old Los Angeles artist's work has a definite 1960s feel to it, says gallery director Jerry Schefcik. "It's very design-based, rather than trying to be absolutely pictorial."

Consisting of four large abstract paintings from four to six feet high and four 18-inch-square drawings in acrylic and ink on paper, the Exposito exhibit "could probably have a lava lamp and it would look fine," Schefcik says.

Exposito's work draws on the design and look of technology of the past, filtered through a modern artist's sensibilities. One painting, for instance, may or may not be a TV attached to a wall.

"The paintings look like certain things, but they're not," Schefcik says.

Another looks as if it could be a standing basketball hoop, or a TV screen on a tall stand.

Yet another looks like it could be a refrigerator with a microwave jutting from the side.

Whatever the viewer thinks they might be, Exposito -- who received his master's degree two years ago from the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles -- has stripped the design elements down to the essentials -- curving black lines painted on a white background -- with some color to fill in between the lines.

The artist favors tertiary colors such as maroon and brown and various shades of blue, orange and green.

In her notes on the exhibit, curator Libby Lumpkin, an assistant professor of art history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, writes that "Exposito generates a great deal of complexity in his apparently `simple' compositions. The designs seem to exist in a sort of virtual space that accommodates both a representational image of a three-dimensional, existing, manufactured object and the two-dimensional, conceptual, diagrammatic plan of the object. ... Exposito is part of an increasingly significant and growing group of artists whose works redefine or test the limits of traditionally held concepts of design."

Exposito's work is represented by the Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Los Angeles. He currently is being featured in a solo exhibition at Bill Maynes Gallery in New York City.

His work has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, and Artforum and Art Issues magazines.

"Out-of-whack geometry is Exposito's specialty," wrote Los Angeles Times reviewer David Pagel. "It allows him to push asymmetrical formats and radically skewed setups to such extremes that the results look graceful, amazingly contained despite the loopy idiosyncracies of their simple, sometimes lumpy components."

The exhibit is open through Oct. 26.