[1] Bastidas’ paintings frequently reference architecture, water, vegetation and art history, and reflect his concern about the human condition, globalization, and their effect on the Earth's well-being.
[2] After returning to New York from a Fulbright Fellowship in his native Ecuador in the early 1990s, Bastidas began using a restricted color palette of black and white, alluding to black-and-white photography.
1 hog's bristle brush on linen primed with rabbit-skin glue, Bastidas achieved a high level of image definition.
His subjects vary from social and or political concerns, to complex pictures that conflict visual perception against cerebral comprehension.
[2] Architecture may serve as scenery for both real and fictional imagery, and is occasionally employed as a social metaphor or to reference natural disasters.
[2] In 1998, art critic Graciela Kartofel wrote about contrasting Latin American and American influences in the Ecuador-born artist's work: Bastidas paints the maladjustments of contemporary society...by capitalizing on his own experience of the contrasts between Latin America and the United States, comparing the visual melodies of both spheres.
The result can be heard in the infinite number of dis-articulated sounds, and in the parodies of an anthropology of the future based on the irony of current social and political relations.
In 2002, art critic Dominique Nahas wrote that Bastidas’ paintings “put forth a plea for cultural integrity”: The artist's deftly stippled, textured works resemble travel photographs of exotic locales, snapshots taken in a time before mass tourism and Club Med.
The blacks and grays shimmer and flicker as if drenched in sunlight...The scenes appear suspended between the real and dream worlds.
[9]In 2004 and 2006, paintings by Bastidas appeared in Architectural Digest magazine articles that featured homes of noted interior designers.