NEW YORK, NY.- Akin to an improvisational jazz performance, Michael Barletta’s abstract paintings and drawings reflect a live moment in time and space. Each stroke of the brush or pen is a spontaneous gesture reflecting the artist’s visceral response to his immediate surroundings and inner emotions.
“I try to capture a moment in time and space without imposing a message other than the arrangement of color and shapes that stir the emotions and engage the senses.”
Michael translates the energy and sound of music, conversation and social interactions into swirling, organic shapes upon the surface of his large canvases and mylar sheets.
Michael is an emerging artist at the vortex of a thriving underground art community in Syracuse, New York. Though self-taught, with no formal art education, Michael has been an avid student of the arts since childhood -- absorbing and transforming the energy, chaos and emotion of the streets, the media and of his immediate environment drawings and paintings that pulse with raw emotion and energy.
Take the work of Takashi Murakami, Matthew Ritchie and Inka Essenhigh and mix it up with the music of contemporary artists and you might find some of Michael’s influences in terms of composition.
“I use my waist, arm and wrist as a pivot point to create arching lines that move my subjects as if they were in suspended in water or hung out in the wind. I want to suggest motion without implying the source.”
Colors and compositional elements are often derived or appropriated from familiar objects, mass media symbols or commercial graphics such as billboards, logos, ads or poster that catch his peripheral vision or a moment exists in pure abstraction. He imposes no message or point of view other than an arrangement of colors and shapes that engage the senses.
Michael’s artwork has recently been seen at the 2008 Everson Museum of Art Biennial, the NYU Kimmel Windows Gallery in NY, and several art fairs in New York and Miami.
The exhibition is on view at
Elisa Contemporary Art through August 31, 2010,
