Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

were times of pre-consumer society industry (before box-making started to go, in Spanish,
by the anglicism “packaging”), when containers were still a craft form, before they lost their
human dimension. Barcala became familiar with cardboard, the stapling machine and boxes,
all of which are key words to understand his mature creative world. As a boy, he also
distributed and delivered boxes in an old (actually rather dilapidated) Ford pick-up which it
was his job to keep running, a chore that provided him with an early familiarity with
machines. (Barcala was particularly fond of a photo that his son took of him behind the
wheel of a 1926 or 1927 jalopy, of the kind that he had driven for the factory.)
While fragile when it came to attending to the little everyday things (he used to say that the
day he had to go to the utility office to pay the electric bill, he couldn’t concentrate on his
painting), he had an unbending strength of conviction and self-confidence in the way he
perceived art - his own and that of others - and the way he assumed and defined the poetry
of his plastic options.
He began, as we shall see, as a figurative painter, although he confessed that he never felt
comfortable being catalogued in any way. “To avoid being labelled as part of this or that
tendency, defined ever more imprecisely, I call these pictures [done in the sixties] ordered
works. They’re ordered canvases with suggestions of other materials that I spread over
fragile frames.” But at a certain point in his life, Barcala decided to eliminate all anecdote
from his art and said so expressly. “There’s nothing I don’t like, except that I don’t like
anything that’s poorly done.” He failed to add that he had also eliminated all anecdote from
his life and had placed it at the service of his art.
He conducted very few exhibitions, and spaced them amply, but each was invariably
conceived with unusually demanding rigour. And all of this went hand-in-hand with an
extremely self-critical attitude, to the extent that he would destroy works that didn’t satisfy
him fully. And I can attest that he spent much of his life trying to recover his paintings (even
the ones already sold) to correct them, i.e., to destroy them. Barcala confessed that he
“constantly (revised) works until I’ve depleted all the inherent possibilities in them. If I’m
satisfied, they’re saved, if not, they’re gone”.
In a letter he wrote me around 1976, Barcala defined himself thus: “I’m committed to
society, to my fellows, but not by the book, but rather by delving deeper into my work, to
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