Robert Baribeau
1949
(USA)
AMERICAN
Robert Baribeau is an American abstract painter whose dynamic, sumptuous paintings express the visceral relationship between the act of painting and the processes of the natural world. Baribeau has long been on the vanguard of exploring the influence of landscape on contemporary abstraction.He lives and works in Stanfordville, New York.
Education
Baribeau earned his BS from Portland State University in 1978, and his MFA from the Pratt Institute in 1979. He has been awarded grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pratt Institute Art Department, and the Florence Saltzman-Heidel Foundation.
Technique
Baribeau constructs his paintings layer upon layer, building color, form and texture into viscous, impasto compositions, on supports that are themselves often thick, and even sculptural. He scratches and scrawls across his surfaces, infusing visceral emotion and energy into the work. His imagery is so layered and dimensional that even his works on paper convey a sense of texture and depth.
Inspiration
Critics have connected Baribeau to a range of aesthetic positions, including everything from Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art to the 19th century Hudson River School, and compared him variously to the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Joan Mitchell, Cy Twombly, and Willem de Kooning. In truth, Baribeau employs a distinctive aesthetic voice that is personal and instantly recognizable, despite its multiplicity. His visual world is one where primordial, organic nature collides with the geometric, manufactured world, and where certain signature visual cues, such as black and white stripes, checkerboards, dots, and flashes of neon color appear and disappear.One of his most well known series is painted on cigar boxes; another is a series of expressionistic flowers. Like the natural forces that inform his practice, his paintings are defined by surprising, even chaotic results, contrasted by a sense of the underlying structure of the image.
Relevant Quote
“Baribeau is primed for intense colors, an ever-changing spectrum of vibrant hues that distinguish these paintings; colors like nature explode. Night, day, winter, spring, find their way onto canvases…Interwoven within the paint are bits of collage: he uses cloth, wallpaper, maps, all tactile visual reminders of place. These are kinds of topological maps of the terrain mixed with the effects of weather, the absolute pure white of the first snowstorm of the season, or the orange reds of sunsets in the fall.”
—Art critic Michael Klein, writing for New American Paintings
Exhibitions
Baribeau has exhibited his work extensively in galleries throughout the United States.
Collections
His work is included in several institutional collections, including those of the Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY; Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., New York, NY; ABC Inc., New York, NY; and Bank of America Securities, San Francisco, Boston and New York.
