Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

superimpose colour (carefully painted) that negotiates its way through the forms, extending
beyond matter or aestheticising it, in an attitude of artistic appropriation, of objectual deindividualisation.
Then he would classify these components in his boxes, like an acritical,
lyrical, romantic entomologist. But, as he did with his Chatarras, Barcala submitted this
organic microworld to rules - minimal vertical and horizontal, virtual or real laws - by which
it is governed and built.
This allowed him to configure a topological space in which sensory and motor, characteristically
topological and metric, projective geometrical figures dynamically co-exist; a space that where
even the slightest vestige of theme is swept away. Sewing machine drawing is also topological
and concurs with the view of certain engravers such as Hercules Seghers (1590-1640), among
the first to explore the world of the textures emerging from engraving, who, turning
serendipity to advantage, learnt to print on small pieces of frayed or scorched linen. Rembrandt
himself was seduced by the results that could be obtained with materials barely touched by the
artist. Something similar was to arise centuries later, with Saul Steinberg’s word drawings, in
which conversations are referred and where a mouth, for instance, does things or a figure levels
insults, resources that enabled the artist to “convert words themselves into illustrations of
their meanings” (Gombrich), and with tapestry weavers, although the experience of the latter
was based on a rupture with conventional artistic procedures.
In this regard Barcala’s work is the exact opposite of abstract art. Barcala (and Nelson
Ramos) took up abstract art, took it up without setting into specifically abstract forms;
paradoxically, he articulated an inarticulate world, as if believing that art and science could
be traced back, eternally, to the same origin within the human being.
In the works done in the late eighties, Barcala began to show signs of a new connexion with
reality; folding everything into a whole, inside his boxes: his own drawings, the odd booklet
of forgotten geometries, Picassian forms; in short, setting the real, pragmatic world against
the world of virtualities. A Cornell without pigeonholes? Yes. And this is not without
consequences. Barcala replaces the American’s - and Torres García’s - static pigeonholes
with a system of sticks, unravelling the other two artists’ structural apriorism. Moreover,
the dose of aestheticism, as from a lost childhood, in Cornell’s boxes is totally absent form
Barcala’s, insofar as matter itself becomes a sign within a structure, thereby eluding the
aestheticism and passivity in the former artist’s works.
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