Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

Self-portraits (1971-1976) would ravage his photographed or even photocopied face, painting
strong and violent stripes across it, as if devising a network of wounds; all of this would be
followed by blotches and cross-outs (for which Rainer used painted lines, whereas Barcala
used strips of wood) to convey the experience of fragmentation, the explosion of the body
as the container. Because ultimately the self-portrait - according to Jean Hélion - is not a
copy, but the confession that the artist makes of one of the states of his/her personality.
In the mid-twentieth century, the West was witness to the battle between the nonfigurative
artists and the then scorned figurative painters (and all the genres deriving from
figuration, including portraits). It was in this context that Washington Barcala painted a little
known document of his beginnings as a painter, Cantina (Canteen, 1948, National Museum
of the Visual Arts, Montevideo) in defiance of mainstream contemporary trends.
This is a notable self-portrait of Barcala, a close-up of the artist seated, holding a cigarette
in his left hand, which rests on a table; a coffee mug in his right; his face, painted from a
three-quarters perspective, with beard and moustache, looking outward at the viewer;
Barcala is located at one edge of the scene, absorbed, perhaps thinking that “the world is
around me”; his image is cropped as if by a photographer. The articles on the table include
an “Ancla” brand matchbox, a “Job” brand box of cigarette paper and a tobacco pouch.
(If the objects painted in this illusionist fashion were replaced by the real things and
pasted on to the backing, we would have a collage; hence their value as a preview, among
others, of his future work.) A few years ago, the North American art historian Robert
Rosenblum delivered a conference at the National Museum of Visual Arts in Montevideo
on the objects used in cubism (and objects there were: indeed, cubist paintings are still
lifes), during which he mentioned the objects in Cantina, a work he just seen for the first
time in the museum. The question that comes to mind in this context is whether, when
painting this canvas, Barcala might have been thinking premonitorily in terms of cubism,
still life and collage.
The background in most traditional self-portraits was neutral. The upper half of the
background in Cantina, on the contrary, contains a mirror. Mirrors usually reveal the other
half of the characters of a painting - making them “round bundles” -, or show the inverted
image (which is why self-portraits were painted without arms, to avoid the brush being held
in the left hand, a technical difficulty that was not overcome until the advent of
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