Tha British-born Bavington devised a chromatic system that keys color to notes on the twelve-tone scale, with which he "scores" his vibrant abstractions. This Postmodern reinvention of the Orphist endavor results in a visual equivalent of rock and roll. Bavington eschews the presumed emotional connotations of color dating back to Goethe and instead conveys pitch, timbre, tone, and tempo through analogous alterations in the hue, intensity, value, and width of his stripes. The glissando of juxtaposed notes is also mimicked in the relative softness of his airbrushed edges. The grand scale of paintings like Little x Little heightens spatial and temporal experience, in which the "music" unfolds in time as the viewer walks in front of the canvas, invoking Gene Davis's music-inspired notion of "an art of space intervals."

While the works of Tim Bavington have the aesthetic markers of high art, the cultural relevancy of lowbrow album covers, coupled with a background in illustration, makes his blend of language especially interesting. Immediately appealing and desirable, the surface-level lust for the neon is as American as anything and appropriate for a Las Vegas-based artist. Yet it's the history of sound and light and his evolving process that prompt return visits to his work. Bavington has built his work upon conceptually cool plastic roots well received critically. Being visual representations of the audible, it's difficult for the viewer not to embrace the musical aestehtic that fills the room. They are fun—and equally serious works. The adaptation of modern techniques joined with his transcendent forms and fields of color make for an exciting combinaiton of his streams of influence.

Bavington's aim is refined synesthesia—to give his beholders some visible good listening, whose quality they might discern. His methodology is simplicity itself. He paints stripes, or slacks or bands of stripes, that signify clefs to describe expressive melodic lines played by an electric guitar. Note lenghts are translated into stripe widths. The scale is translated into a spectrum of hues around triads in a key. The hues vary in pitch and value. Among other things, this method solves the "stripe-painter's problem": what color goes next to which? This is given in the music. As a result, Bavington's paintings are easily as synthetic as teh most disciplined conceptualization and easilty more remote. They  begin as crypto-expressive narratives. Bevington encodes expressive music into bright and frozen waterfalls in fog. 

The airbrushed acrylics on canvas provided Bavington with just the right mix of freedom and necessity, will and determinism, order and randomness, work and play, rigor and recklessness. Viewers got a lot more than that: electrifying abstractions that hummed, buzzed and sizzled with visual energy. Bavington's rock-insprired paintings ran the gamut, somethimes slipping subtly, with unbelievably eloquent delicacy, from one tone to another, and at other times hitting hard, as if delivering the deep gutteral rumble of those bass notes you feel in your solar plexus and react to, in your lizard brain, long before your cerebral cortex even gets wind of what your body is already intimately involved with.

Tim Bavington, a leader in the new geometric abstraction, creates large, airbrushed polymer paintings whose stripes function as indexes to guitar riffs from classic rock songs. Bavington indicates that the mathematical proportions of his stripes' widths represent the length of those musical pieces. In Makin' Out (2005), he experiments with the ration of vertical stripes to an extended horizonal canvas and, in the center, constructs a compact dynamic tension. Color represents the auditory sound shifts. Living in Las Vegas influences his unusual palette, whose desert shades appear alongside acidic colors to create a crackling electricity.

In non-objective as well as representational art, we interpret contrasts in hue and value as having spatial meaning, making some areas appear to pop forward, while others seem to recede into the background. Tim Bavington's Step (In) Out is painted in stripes that continually vary in degrees of hue and value contrasts. At first glance it may appear flat, but as you continue to stare at it without trying to hold it flat mentally, it will quickly develop a spatial pattern that goes in and out. 

Painting <=> Design aims to push the discussion beyond the either-or rut in which it seems to be stuck. The exhibition brings together works by nine Southern California artists from several generations who work within and around the idiom of design. What unites their diverse paintings on canvas, panel, and metal is the simple idea that the best defense is a good offense. Rather than waiting around for design to set the terms of the debate, and responding, reactively, to its assertions, these paintings make the first move and address design from the get-go. In various ways, Tim Bavington, Karl Benjamin, Bart Esposito, Frederick Hammersley, Darcy Huebler, Jim Isermann, Jean Lowe, Kim MacConnel and Candace Nycz establish their own dialogues with the wide world of design, making paintings athat are not territorial or stand-offish, but open-ended and promiscuous—cosmopolitan, urbine, free-wheeling, and eccentrically individualistic.

I would argue the extreme is the word of today. It's the adjective that appears on everything from nail polish, television make-over programs, Doritos snack chips, toothpaste, and tow trucks, to a whole new genre of sports. Extreme has become the word to describe the unusual, extraordinary, daring, out-there, and the especially intense and dramatic. Extreme is the new cool. [...] Today, new is extreme. Consider the Hammer, Las Vegas, cable TV, and postmodern theory. In a manner of speaking, one could say that Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery is abstraction. Extreme Abstraction celebrates this legacy in a truly contemporary way, by surrendering the entire museum to this great language in a way that reveres the old masters, but takes them out of an historical comfort zone into an arena of experimentation and risk that is the backbone of this great institution.

During the 1990s, the artists in Las Vegas Diaspora: The Emergence of Contemporary Art from the Neon Homeland were students of mine in the art department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. [...] I wanted to recruit the best, teach them how to play defense, and hope they make the pros. Nice personalities and tidy middle-class backgrounds were not a priority for me. [...] I depended on the recommendations of good artists at good schools. I tried to recruit smart, well-educated kids from big cities, and the young artists who actually came to Vegas were all that. [...] I remember walking into Tim Bavington's studio and seeing the first visibly and intellectiualy coherent group of abstract paintings the program produced. Since Tim's day-job at that time was drawing for The Simpsons, I considered this to be, if not a big step up at least a giant-step over.

This type of painting emerged in Los Angeles in the late 1950s. Its leading figures were John McLaughlin, Karl Benjamin, Frederick Hammersley and Lorser Feitelson. Critic Jules Langsner coined the term "hard edge" as a fairly straightforward description of the clean contours and precise edges of the shapes in their abstract paintimgs. The California half of the exhibition is built around the works of Karl Benjamin, Billy Al Bengston and Lee Mullican, who all began exhibiting in the 1950s. The six other artists in this half of the show build on the work of Benjamin, Bengston, and Mullican. Tim Bavington and Candace Nycz are the most clear-cut hard edgers. They take the supersaturated tints of Benjamin and soften their edges without diminishing their impact. 

Tim Bavington's pristine paintings redeem visual static. Like the garbled crackles and hisses that interupt the music on your car radio, or the electronic "snow" that breaks up the picture on your TV, his painterly disruptions prevent the transmission of clear messages. Unlike these annoying intrusions into scheduled programming, however, Bavington's static is fun to look at. Initially unanticipated, then welcomed, then finally addictive, Bavington's paintings present us with a more accurate model of how art functions than that put forth by the F.C.C. Borrowing indiscriminately from late '60s high modernist abstraction, fashion chromatics and low-brow car culture, Bavington's exquisitely aribrushed images make this smart-aleck conflation look so terriffic that you forget where the images come from and focus on where they take you. Before his slick pictures, art is a ride for thrill-seekers from all walks of life.