Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

But let us return to Barcala’s collages, which borrow from drawing; the shapes are wholly
defined (in the photographic sense of the word) and the drawing always appears to be in
conflict with the other languages. Sometimes they contain linear drawings (an up-side-down
triangle or rectangle) on which a material counterpart is superimposed (a stick cross, for
instance), to either scratch over what is underneath or make it reverberate. On other
occasions, they invoke axonometric perspective, conical perspective, a few spots or certain
random numbers. They may even comprise an entirely linear structure, resulting from the
handling of thread alone in counterpoint dialogue with the collage. The blacks may appear
to be burnt at times, as in the works of Alberto Burri. In the boxes, as in these paintings,
the ideational (the spiritual) is to be found conversing with matter (technology). Barcala was
to say in this connection: “My oeuvre is the attempt to create spaces where relationships
are visual, to establish propositions where form, with its general appearance or identity,
expresses the various realities of the material or spiritual world”. Such is Barcala’s aesthetic,
a peculiar version of the aesthetics of collage.
Real materials and illusory painting
Nineteenth century artists could still express themselves through harmonious and closed
forms, producing a coherent discourse; but that creative gesture, once believed to be
unitary, fell apart in the early twentieth century, in keeping with the disintegration taking
place in other areas (such as the atom in the field of physics) and the modernist creed. It
was then that the collage (hand-in-hand with cubism) made its appearance, with its aesthetic
of fragment and paste. Fragments are a simile for disorder, the penetration of dissonance in
the very heart of a totality believed to harmonious and non-contradictory.
This aesthetic would also be extended into literature. Joyce interrupted syntactic linearity
with interior dialogue; Proust not only drew from quotation (i.e., including a fragment of
another author’s text in one’s own), allusion (i.e., one text underneath another) or
intertextuality (one text for another, a copy, even falsehood), but accumulated and
juxtaposed different tenses, expressing the relativity of our space-time constants, an
understanding deriving from Albert Einstein’s theories. Fernando Pessoa, in turn, wrote
polyhedral books in which neither reading nor materials were linear, in which, to use
Cortázar’s words, there was room for “all worlds, the world”. In the Argentinean’s novel
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