Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

It is no coincidence that there is a snake in the centre of the composition, framed by a semicylinder.
According to Filón de Alejandría, the snake symbolises what both kills and what
cures, i.e., medicine.
Whereas Renaissance artists placed the image of Christ in the vanishing point of perspective
space, the point of privilege (from which virtual rays emerged, as if from a “luminous body”),
in his Boceto para mural (Sketch for a mural), Barcala placed the individual - the doctor
perhaps, the professor, the scientist - in the vanishing point, in what is apparently an allegory
of science.
Notes of a travelling painter
Around 1950 Barcala travelled to Madrid where he took courses in engraving and fresco
painting, the latter under Daniel Vázquez Díaz in the San Fernando School. He later took a
leisurely tour of Europe for nearly two years and at the end of that time, comparing what
he had seen with what was being produced in Latin America, he came to the conclusion that
the most important South American painters strove to express themselves in a universal
language, which at the time was abstraction.
Two drawings have been recovered from that trip to Europe, both of which are travel notes.
One is of Lisbon, a city which, like his Montevideo birth place, overlooks a river (the Tagus)
as wide as the sea (as Juan Ramón Jiménez defined the River Plate). The other is of Las
Palmas de Gran Canaria, the other port of call for the vessels (in Uruguay they were called
trans-Atlantic cruisers) that crossed the ocean between South America and Europe. These
two drawings have a charm of the same sort that characterised the drawings of the so-called
“travelling painters”, Europeans who visited Latin America - beginning in the sixteenth
century and more assiduously beginning in 1800 after the arrival of Alexander von
Humboldt - and documented the astonishment that the New World inspired in them, with
its landscapes, life and customs.
The drawing of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria is particularly significant and even anticipatory.
The artist placed a small boat on the horizon, drawing it in a way that seems to herald the
disintegration of form. Two decades later, in Barcala’s collages, the virtual masts in this
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