Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

e able to convey something live to others”. For Barcala (like Rafael Barradas before him,
who also lived, studied, created and exhibited in Spain), painters live painting to the extent
of inhabiting a (spiritual?) identity somewhere in between two trades: painting and living.
Barcala before Barcala
He received his early training in the Montevideo Circle of Fine Arts between 1939 and
1942. There he studied under painter Guillermo Laborde (1886-1940), a fine colourist and
excellent teacher who gave his students a knowledge of painting (including contemporary
trends) while encouraging each one’s expressive personality.
At the time Barcala painted landscapes and views au naturel, in the out of doors; his series
on Estaciones de ferrocarril (Railroad stations) is representative of this period: station
landscapes, trains, their noise, smoke, paintings very much in line with a tradition initiated
by Claude Monet with his Gare de St. Lazare series. They represent the intrusion of the
machine in everyday life and, to a certain extent, constitute a pictorial metaphor of the
communication between country and city that trains signified, when the sense of distance
was quite different than it is today. But what truly counts in these paintings is not the choice
of the symbolism related to the industrial world, but the pictorial exercise itself, the
perspective structure of space based on the convergence of the rails and the vanishing
point. Robert Delaunay warned: “The railway is an image of succession that tends to be
parallel: the parity of rails”. Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of that assertion was “Rails that
converge without converging, that converge to remain equidistant, the world that is as I see
it in order to be independent of me”. By depicting the rails head on (an anti-pictorial vantage
that all modern painters repudiate as a typically Renaissance approach), Barcala evinced his
attraction to conical perspective - the first type of perspective discovered in the
Renaissance, epitomised by the placement of Christ at the vanishing point in Leonardo’s Last
Supper - revealing the classical spirit that the artist embosomed.
But this perspective is concealed behind the density of the pigment (a technique introduced
in Uruguayan painting by the Uruguayan macchiaiolo Carlos Federico Sáez, 1879-1901, and
developed by Alfredo de Simone, 1890-1950, artists who clearly showed that the impasto
cannot be controlled), evincing his feel for the surface, as if prioritising the pictorial layer to
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