This Saturday from 6-8pm, the gallery opens Ruined Lust, a solo exhibition of works by Rhode Island-based artist David Barnes. The exhibition will be on view in Miami through April 4th.

Borderlands, ruins, gray areas, and spaces where subjects maneuver, resist, and improvise are the territories that Barnes’s paintings inhabit. They are images of potentialities, reinventions, aftermaths, lulls—idealisms and failures. Yet, in a contemporary political moment when despair is the easy fallback, these paintings dare to be hopeful. They also reveal what’s at stake.

Barnes found early inspiration in the L.A. Dogtown Z-Boys culture, the young skateboarders who transformed their surroundings, repurposing Venice California’s ruined urban landscape after the economic stresses and drought of the ’70s. Abandoned homes and empty backyard pools became sites of reinvention, where destruction itself became a medium for renewal. Barnes captures the era’s utopian impulse—a reclamation of the discarded and forsaken—with an unmistakable optimism. His paintings of dry, graffiti-covered pools and of contemporary skate parks modeled after them show us the vestigial reimagined. And they anticipate his ongoing fixation on the arid landscape and all its current implications.

From Z-Boys to utopian architecture, from Roman ruins to the contemporary ruin of ecologies, economies, even democracies, Barnes mines his own travel sketches and photos, and the endless news cycle of images and footage for what is prevalent and urgent. Then he does something quieter: he shows us the edges, the impartial view, yet rich with atmosphere. Ancient ruins become cautionary tales; riots and protests become damage and debris; borderlands and airports become transitory, nondescript theaters. And in his latest obsession, the banal architecture of the energy-hungry data center becomes the sprawling material footprint of AI’s promised immaterial future.

Yet Barnes believes in the future—because he can still see beauty in the present. He might believe that today’s utopian projects are tomorrow’s ruins, but not for long, as rebirth shall inevitably rise out of the ashes. Consider the cataclysms we now take as normal: technological acceleration, environmental destabilization, political upheaval, and planetary-scale extraction. Informed by his Buddhist practice and a grounded sense of history’s cycles of invention, failure, and regeneration, Barnes’s take on the unstable present and speculative future is relatively calm, almost neutral. His paintings create a space for contemplation and potentiality—an insistence on beauty and stillness even within the oppositional spectacle that rages around us.

An accomplished painter, Barnes has all the chops of a Luc Tuymans or Raoul De Keyser: thin, fast, ruthlessly economical—but with more urgent stakes. His color has the saturated authority of Neo Rauch, strange, chemical, rendering the air itself gorgeous yet unbreathable. What really sets Barnes apart, though, is his conceptual rigor. His peripheral visions and threshold spaces evoke something in mid-process or in the act of undoing. And that is precisely the way they are painted: a few right angles, a blur, a smear—hovering with uncertainty but dead on. Each mark must land in the right place on the first try before it can coalesce into architecture, a figure running, a plastic water bottle discarded. The paintings risk collapse and sometimes do. For every ‘successful’ canvas, half a dozen face the studio wall. It’s all or nothing, a high-wire act without a net. Precarity is Barnes’s central theme, the through line of his subjects, and, thrillingly, the condition in which he paints. Thus, he speaks to our contemporary, existential now.

-Text by Bradley Wester