Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

epresenting both masculine and feminine, right side up and upside down triangles, black
and white triangles, flat triangles, triangles in relief. What Barcala pursued was duality,
opposites attracting and repelling, seeking and rejecting one another until they would meet
in a place where the forces in play could reach a balance and harmony would reign. His
works re-created this struggle between opposing forces: wood slats cutting across his
compositions, geometric shapes and numbers drawn with thread or on paper, like insistent
calculations in an unending search. His subjects were recurrent, obsessive, the same figures
appeared time after time. The artist’s hand was more like the hand of a scientist who,
knitting and unknitting, appeared to want to unravel the very reason for his search. Then
the triangles began to fall apart and the geometries, while never disappearing altogether,
gradually gave way to cloth. Here colour started to find its way into some of his works. Up
until this point colour, outside of black and white, appeared only sporadically. But now the
calm in former works was shattered and movement appeared, in the form of overlapping
cloth. Some of the pictures scarcely had any paint at all and the lines were drawn solely with
wood and fabric. The triangles and squares started to alternate with bits of paper.
Solemnity, never very apparent, disappeared altogether and these new works were flecked
with figurative references, albeit in small doses.
In the early nineties, more specifically in 1991, he was told he had a brain tumour. This blow
was obviously going to mark his perception of life and therefore of his oeuvre. He did a
series on heads in the following years. Heads were depicted as something deconstructable:
drawings of heads, circles and pieces of wood that describe an empty skull posing as a
surgeon-alchemist over its own grey matter... However, in his “constructivist” zeal, Barcala
would build heads, as the titles of some of his works indicate: Construyendo un perfil [Building
a profile] (1992), Construyendo una cabeza [Building a head] (1992), Cabeza dibujada y otra
en construcción [Head drawn and head under construction] (1992). It was as though, through
art, he wanted to cling to the life that he knew was slipping away, to use the magic of motion
to transform what had been wounded.
Barcala always seemed to come back to the same themes: indeed, he painted a first head
much earlier, a sort of premonition of what was to come later, in Sin título [Untitled] (1964).
The artist did not forsake geometry in these works; he created circles, horizon lines and
triangles with his wood slats, his expressive base remained unaltered. Paper and cloth, black
and white, were constants, but they ceased to be smooth surfaces, now appearing in
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