Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

Barcala, painter of limits
Ángel Kalenberg
Washington Barcala, perhaps the most significant Uruguayan artist of his generation,
erected a personal, consistent and rigorous oeuvre in a career that spanned half a century;
eluding dissonance, he took refuge in a bare, intimate, nearly impenetrable and yet
overwhelmingly sensitive language. His production can be structured around three major
hubs: figurative painting (1946 to 1950) followed by an eight-year interval of inactivity in
plastic arts; lyrical, abstract painting with an Informalist bias, between 1961 and 1964, which
left us his Chatarras (Scrap metal); and the Cajas (Boxes). From 1967 onward he
consummated what, in my opinion, can be regarded as the most fertile part of his career.
With his Cajas he made use of the remains, the leftovers of throw-away consumer society
to reformulate and update old vanitas art.
It all began very precociously when, in the mid forties, Barcala did the mock-ups for mardi
gras street stages (his fellow countryman and Sáez Group colleague, Manuel Espínola
Gómez, would also get his start in this way) with pieces of wood, cardboard and string. This
was a preview of things to come after he chose to take up painting.
——o——
Uruguayan, the only child of a middle class family (of Spanish descent on his father’s side and
Italian on his mother’s), Washington Barcala grew up sharing his play and study time with
jobs in his parents’ cardboard box factory. There he worked with a raw material that, many
years later, he would use in his art: he learned how to punch-press, assemble and staple
cardboard to turn it into boxes for shoes, ravioli, candy, pastry dough and jewellery; those
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