Bart Exposito’s geometric paintings don’t draw from utopian ideals or a revision of abstraction, but rather the cold neutrality of graphic design. More pop than pop, his flat pantone coloured canvases celebrate the zen-like fizz of commodified nothingness. Seducing with the plastic banality of album covers or corporate logos, Exposito’s The New Face of Smiling negotiates both aesthetics and its functions as cultural interface and lifestyle arbitration. Through his ultra-flat, airtight compositions Exposito enforces the impersonal and anonymous as a comforting numbness.

Reverberating in groovy brown and orange, Bart Exposito’s Slanted/Enchanted is an emblem of retro chic. Suggesting circuit boards or video game graphics, Exposito pits painting against virtual reality: his cold flawless canvas expands as a simulated field of non-existent space. Operating with cool detachment, Exposito’s hard-edged abstraction wavers as hypnotic entity; its mesmerising lines and voids flicker with unnatural energy, redolent of computer screens.

In Earth 3 Exposito’s composition defies spatial perspective. Mapping out areas with quietly undulating tones, each hue claims a hierarchical order in the field of depth, setting up a system of optical rationale for painterly subversion. Using colour as a starting point for illusion, Exposito drafts a central motif of an impossibly twisted form; its blocky three dimensional suggestion delineated by flat graphic lines and off-kilter vanishing points that constantly float between foreground and distance.

Emblazoned on the canvas in tasteful fashion tones, Exposito’s Bubble & Scrape seduces with its ultra-modern authority. Executed with a commercially slick finish, Exposito’s abstracted motif carries the weight of a design classic, cross referencing from iconic periods of the 20th c: from the geometric opulence of art deco to the space age ambition of the 60s. Reinventing these with a contemporary flair, Exposito’s work streamlines the aesthetics of desire, his painting posing as a luxuriant archetype of timeless beauty.

Exposito’s seamless painting style takes its lineage from 60s minimalism, where forms and materials were pared down to their bare essence. Exposito’s bold motifs draw from the aesthetic styles of this period, combining associations to hippy aspiration and retronostalgia with their contemporary revival as design elegance, suburban chic, and commodity glamour. In Cyclo, Exposito’s curved pattern beacons with the simplified and understated power of a type-font, referencing both the subtle beauty of calligraphic contour, and the indistinction between – and complete conjugation of – form and content.