Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

Barcala did not need large formats or spectacular shapes to build; he approached art from
simplicity, turning his view to all that is small, poor and accessible so that, in this discourse,
it could take flight under the gaze of others. What his oeuvre has to tell us, it says in a hush,
in what almost seems to be chance harmony but which was actually measured, meditated
on, hour after hour in the artist’s studio, seeking but never reaching the ultimate ideal. Each
picture could be what it was or something else, the next one took up where the preceding
one left off, because the last word had never been said and everything overlapped between
one piece of cloth and another, between seam and seam. Like the summers spent in Paris
with friends. Every year, he would submit one painting to the Grand Palais, the same picture
he had hung the year before, but different because it had been changed in the interim. Every
year the work submitted was a remake of the one submitted the year before.
His works allude to architecture, stairways, geometry, compositions, the importance of
materials, but at the same time his oeuvre is an expression of personality and its fragility, of
darkness and light, everyday occurrences that, like the lesser beams in a building, underpin
our lives. Barcala knew how to take these daily and personal events as a point of departure
and then disappear in them, leaving a nude work in which he had participated but then left
to its own devices. He built his own language without having to resort to constant
innovation, with no need to break through barriers with ever bolder novelties. He was the
language, the language of his world, of the materials that comprise his works. His was the
hushed speech of things inert, that express what has been said not in words but with
gestures. This slow, calm gesture seeks nothing, imposes nothing, but remains because it has
pushed nothing or no-one aside, trued always to its own course.
To remain in things like the wandering soul of the traveller that, in passing, leaves all it had
and all it transformed in its interior, with the gaze of the searcher possessed of the magic
able to change everything without moving anything in the still of the retina. “Washington
used to come to share silences” his friend Alejandro Casares once told me. From his
silence, Barcala has forged a place for himself in our history. He came and built, bringing,
with his weary southern gait, a way of creating out of anything small. His oeuvre, then,
remains, as a sigh of light that casts no shadow, leaving its footprint without treading, like a
bridge between two worlds blending into one in his art.
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