Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

drawing would become real sticks primitive tribes, it may be recalled, used sticks for
drawing maps), which he would paste on to different support media.
With regard to his move from the traditional to the experimental, the artist himself would
note: “It is a long evolution that perhaps began in 1948. I was never a copier of nature, but
beginning in that year I see that there are photos of a painting, which no longer exists (I
have destroyed hundreds of works), but which is clearly an incursion into painting that is no
longer figurative, in which abstraction has taken hold; it was the structure of a street with
large masses of light on a white canvas. Then - I went for many years without painting, from
1950 to 1958 there was no tangible creation - came the stage of very hard looking. In 1958
I started to incorporate different materials. That was followed by the use of scrap metal and
so on and on”.
The Chatarras (Scrap metal)
First of all, the name. Why did he (deliberately) call them Chatarras (Scrap metal)? María
Moliner (Spanish dictionary author) defines “chatarra” as “dregs from iron ore. Iron from
old utensils, in particular, any that is collected, bought, sold, etc., for recycling. Applied
hyperbolically to things made of iron, such as machines or devices, that have grown nearly
useless: ‘That typewriter [a shame Moliner did not choose a sewing machine - a very fitting
reference in the case of Barcala - for her illustration] is chatarra”. And “chatarra” is also a
word in the Informalist vocabulary.
In any event, Chatarras, dating from 1961 and therefore created after the artist’s first long
trip to Europe to study, although perhaps reminiscent of a certain orientalism that prevailed
at the time, reached nearly generational status of such magnitude that they permeated the
production of Manuel Espínola Gómez, José Gamarra (1931) and Nelson Ramos (1931).
They are all temperas, in white, grey and black, painted with flowing strokes, a sumptuous
material and formally very refined. And so? Perhaps the artist wanted to allude to the dregs
of figurative art? Christening them in this way, he may have had in mind the portrayal of
landscapes or formless objects, i.e., objects that lost their initial form, painted with
ambiguous colours. This is the view that Uruguayans see when they stroll along the
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