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.
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.
