Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

of the country’s painters to plunge their spatulas into matter-based art, drawing from a dual
source: one, the impasto employed by Carlos Federico Sáez; and the other, scraps of wood
- to build objects - as used by master Joaquín Torres García and his pupils.
The former feature banks on what might be regarded as the specificity of the pictorial, the
paste, the saturation of pigment, the multiplication of pictorial layers, the juxtaposition of
strokes. Carlos Federico Sáez, Pedro Blanes Viale (1878-1926) and Pedro Figari (1861-1938)
would make use of this language beginning in the late nineteenth century. But the survival
of the orthogonal pattern, also embraced by Barcala (and Nelson Ramos as well), enabled
him to both control matter (and colour) and endow it with classic balance.
The latter aspect rests on a number of premises. It assumes that if all art is material (in the
seventies Jean François Lyotard believed he had found evidence of immaterial art) - and at
one time matter constituted the medium, the backing, on which to introduce or engrave
figures - now, with the change in times, material may directly adopt the lead role, acting as
both medium and surface. And the surface can, furthermore, be made to include sticks,
sawdust, sand, newspaper, sandpaper, scrap metal, glass, pottery, string, leather, thread. It
was as if the Uruguayan had sensed the theses of artists who rejected the mechanistic
interpretation of matter and postulated that, on the contrary, matter has a dynamic
potential, as it is “rife with morphogenetic capacities, and therefore is itself able to generate
forms. [...] it is not a question of the essence of the ‘soap bubble’ being somehow imposed
from without, an ideal geometric form (sphere) that shapes an inert series of molecules.
Rather, a topological endogenous form, a point in the space defined by the energetic
possibilities to which this molecular configuration gives rise, guides the collective behaviour
of the soap molecules and as a result produces a spherical shape” (Manuel de Landa, in
Deleuze, los diagramas y la génesis de la forma [Deleuze, diagrams and genesis of form]). It is
as though Barcala’s work exuded an underlying optimism, delighting in and thereby
instituting a new way of viewing matter.
This features enunciates both the formless and the formalised, chaos and order, the
intersection of physical and psychic, the blurring of the boundaries between figuration and
non-figuration, objective and subjective, pre- and post-industrial.
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