Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

Mannerism but also, and above all, a result of the rise of Spain in Europe - during the
Council of Trent -, insofar as the fashion of wearing black was part of the Spanish legacy in
the Netherlands and southern Italy.)
Art was not to discover a symbiosis able to renovate painting on the basis of tradition until
Velázquez appeared. Black was to be used as a colour from then on, in addition to the
coloured greys of the Venetian school. And Manet, who studied Velázquez’ work (as well as
Frans Hals’, which drew from the use of black as well) so carefully, understood this very
early on. And Barcala also felt black as a colour and not as a shadow. (Here it should be said
that decades later, the black in Barcala’s clothing in Cantina would be transformed into the
tar-black used on his boxes.)
Cantina has a very “orderly” (one of the favourite words in Barcala’s vocabulary), well coordinated
structure, to the point that the painting can be seen to be in the tradition of Cézanne.
In the same way that Johannes de Eyck painted his name, first and last, on the wall of the
Arnolfini couple’s bedroom (a genuine precursor of conceptual art), the Uruguayan could
have written Washington Barcala fuit hic (in either of its two meanings: Washington Barcala
was here, or Washington Barcala was this mirror) on the walls of his corner canteen.
Boceto para mural (Sketch for a mural)
The composition of this 1946 sketch wreaks of classicism, with an approach to structure
reminiscent of Torres García. Indeed, in the horizon that springs from the tip of the goldtoned
section, Barcala established a somewhat idealised, Platonic vision, a depiction of
airiness. The trees that Barcala painted here are closely related to the ones in murals by Puvis
de Chavanne and Torres García. And the tiny running figure may be a tribute to similar figures
created by Giorgio de Chirico. Immediately underneath this sector is the area corresponding
to the worldly part of the picture (perhaps equivalent to an underground world), in which the
allusion to intellectual work, research, is a metaphor for the human warren.
One possible interpretation of the work may be that it takes an entire community working
underground for everything to be idyllic in the space above.
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