Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

promenade that flanks the south quarter at dusk or on foggy days: combed by the air, forms
become formless and Montevideo’s gasometer looks like a black mountain or one of Mario
Sironi’s landscapes.
Some are composed with blotches that are nearly forms, in which respect they may be
compared to works by Julius Bissier and Roger Bissière. A few, like the French artist’s
compositions, are a consummation of atmospheric painting. Others are reminiscent of the
gestural act of archaic scriptures - flourishes or perhaps scribblings - stencilled in, in the
tradition of the language used by Georges Mathieu and Simon Hantaï. Stains, traces, signs,
an occasional and spontaneous graphism that respond to no organisational logic; rather, the
artist positions them (in an empty space, in a non-space) involuntarily, randomly (this is
another of the emblematic words in Barcala’s dictionary). Jackson Pollock’s dripping
technique also harboured a random element: neither Pollock nor Barcala used painting to
express concepts or judgements of a rational order.
In their gestural status, the involuntary, irrational but non-dramatic forms of Barcala’s
Chatarras, show the artist’s disdain for rigid, a priori structure and stress the importance of
existential considerations, which the Uruguayan expressed more through matter per se than
through form, at the very “moment that his vision becomes gesture” (Merleau-Ponty).
Giulio Carlo Argan wrote that if we tried to convey the lines of the energy emanating from
a city such as New York, in plastic media, we would have a Jackson Pollock painting. And if
we tried to do the same with Barcala’s Chatarras, if we wanted to see his work as the
transposition of a city, what city might that be? Perhaps Montevideo’s South quarter, with
its elegant, calm and introverted pace (a quarter where I lived with my family for nearly two
decades and where we were often visited by Barcala, a unrepentant “noctawanderer” - to
use poet Rubén Darío’s neologism -, who would drop by for a cup of coffee and to discuss
matters relevant to the National Fine Arts Commission, on which we both sat).
Barcala did not copy reality, he replaced it with signs, those primary components of his
Chatarras. In addition to their autonomous status as images, they contain an ineluctable
determination that charges them with action. These abstract and active signs are not easy
to define or fix. In Wols’ case, one might speak of bacterial explosions, or of fireworks in
Georges Mathieu’s oeuvre.
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