Working in painting and sculpture, Bart Vargas creates exuberant works that reflect the way we live today. He freely cites art history and pop culture in works that include oversized paintings of banal and provocative phrases (“bacon”, “holy shit”, “feminist”), maps of the U.S. and China encrusted with paint, and fragmented targets reminiscent broken-down Jasper Johns paintings. “Their energy, movement, color and form leaves the surface and enters a space, or even better, the viewer,” Vargas has said. “In their essence each one of them is a celebration, and that is all they need to be.” In his sculptural works he explores the artistic potential of trash, rearranging these cast-off items to create “artifacts of the early 21st century.”