Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

lotches of paint, black stains or ghost-like figures that began to emerge time and again in
the author’s pictures.
These were his latter years. The control and constraint of the earlier Spanish paintings were
gone. He, the architect and builder of wood and thread, became a dark apparition that
haunted his canvases. Memories, annotations and a figure constantly poised to bid farewell,
took command of the works in this final stage of his life. This new figuration had little to do
with the figuration of his Montevideo paintings. Now it was a shadowed figure, a silhouette,
with no specific features. The painter knew he was ill, aching of death and, in his
determination to tell us what had been silenced, he depicted all this accumulated emotion
in his paintings. It had always been difficult for him to decide when a picture was finished,
but now his works appeared to be endless; he seemed to be locked into the “continuing
dynamic” so characteristic of abstract expressionism.
Less than twenty years after his arrival in Madrid he set about returning to his homeland to
die. In this narrow span of time, Barcala created a wide-ranging oeuvre. He absorbed things,
and very naturally, from a country that was not his own but that would characterise his art:
drama, austerity and sharp contrast. With these elements and what he had learned and
grasped before, he created art of a very individual nature and not easily classified.
In silence
“Tenderly, lightly, with restraint and rigour, cleanly, sweetly and slowly, in elegant flight,
Barcala created work of extraordinary quality, while hardly anyone noticed” (Lucio Muñoz).
The temptation in modern art is to broach creation from a novel vantage, to surprise and
astound and thereby attain what Warhol called one’s 15 minutes of fame, heading the
dubious list of art in vogue or art of the day. But there are artists who work from their own
art, who resist the temptation to always do something new; these are artists who focus on
creating timeless works, based on tradition and immersed in modern technique, works that
follow the course that their delicate human condition charts: the ongoing pursuit of the
eternal, the mystery of existence. They create and build without shouting, in silence,
because there is no louder cry than one that endures.
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