Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

photography). Mirror images also enable experimentation with double self-portraits, whose
distant precedent is to be found in Carlo Dolci’s Double self-portrait (1674).
But the glass in this mirror takes a rather odd perspective: it reflects the artist seen from
the front, smoking, exhaling the smoke; there is a bottle of wine on the table and, seated
beside it, the figure of a man, perhaps talking to the author. The two scenes, the one painted
and the one reflected, correspond to two different, consecutive moments. In this case the
picture within the picture is as important as the picture itself, because the one supplements
the information to be found in the other.
The mirror (rimmed by a heavy frame) also contains the reflection of a shelf (for goblets,
perhaps) and an old-fashioned clothes rack. But the main purpose of the mirror is to open
space towards the back and front of the picture on the bi-dimensional plane of the canvas,
multiplying the depth of the painted space. “The seduction of the mirror is so powerful that
when looking at one of these paintings we tend to forget that what is reflected in the glass
is not a natural reflection, but a ‘picture within a picture” (Julián Gállego).
The flat surface of a painting has always been compared to a mirror - Leonardo pointed out
this similitude many centuries ago - and to a mirror with something behind it. For Leonardo,
the mirror served as a model for painting, as “every painter’s master”, a tradition that
continued on through Marcel Duchamp and Julio Le Parc, and although Barcala is not a
naturalist painter, in Cantina he also resorted to a mirror. For Jorge Luis Borges, the mirror
is “an impossible space of reflection”, about which he wrote “... I am the flesh and the face
I don’t see”; “Why do you persist, ceaseless mirror? / Why do you, mysterious brother,
duplicate / even the slightest movement of my hand? / Why in the shadow of sudden
reflection? / Do you become that other I the Greek meant / and always stalking...” (Al espejo
- To the mirror1 ).
The mirror, Merleau-Ponty would sustain, “... is the instrument of a universal magic that
changes things into a pageant, a pageant into things, me into someone else and someone
else into me”.
Self-portraits are always somewhat reminiscent of the “mirror in the picture”. Because noone
can see themselves except through others; in the eyes of the person we talk to, in a
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