Weaves, Painting Paintings, 2012

Gallery AS, Sydney, Australia.

Exhibition Press Release:

This new series from Ben Barretto bring a much more defined art object to his often ephemeral performance, sound and installation practice. These new works illustrate a maturity and material sensitivity that mark Barretto’s returning from self-initiated residency in Los Angeles as an important early career Australian artist.

Employing a rudimentary hand-made loom Barretto’s aim is to “reference the fleeting nature of abstraction… by feeding them through a process of labour.” Developed from small quickly laid down sketches the composition of these weaves are then digitised to play with colour. This process along with the gridded method of weaving and the brilliance of the coloured ropes make these textiles appear as broken screens or corrupted digital image data. Luminous as if light backed and appearing as pixels the fields of colour create an extremely contemporary and technological subject from the medieval tradition of hand crafts.

Relying on materials available in building centres and hardware stores, Barretto instills the work with an interesting duality; the machismo and stout ruggedness of hard labour with the precision, sensitivity, earnestness and quietness of textile craft making. Builders rope, bricklayers line, levelling and engineering twine, the artist quipped that he enjoyed sourcing the materials from providers that would be entirely miffed by their final use and the irony of using materials that were invariably the by-products rather than the focus.

Though Barretto has been using similar ideas and materials for most of a decade, continuing his ongoing exploration into recursion, repetition and cycles (particularly his motorised sculptures, looped sound work and assisted mechanical paintings) these works have a firm deliberateness that include chance and randomness with conviction and thoroughness.

- Joseph Allen Shea, 2012.