Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

Rayuela (Hopscotch), as in the Portuguese author’s brilliant The book of disquiet, the
structure enables the reader to randomise the order in which he/she chooses to read the
chapters. Cortázar himself wanted La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos (Around the day in
eighty worlds) to be “A book [...] made of scraps and cast-aways, like a huge collage”. The
powers of fragmentation were also invoked by musicians, who disintegrated the concept of
tonal globaility by resorting to electronic sound and new sub- and microtonal modulations:
Luigi Nono with Fragmentstille, an Diotima; Karlheinz Stockhausen and his “momentaryforms”
and even Debussy’s two books of Preludes for piano, in the words of his antidilettante
Monsieur Croche, apostrophise the Wagnerian orchestra as a “sort of
multicolour clay spread so uniformly that you can barely distinguish the sound of a violin
from that of a trombone”. The orchestration of collagistic music, on the contrary,
individualises and dis-integrates.
“Filming,” Serguéi M. Eisenstein said, in turn, “is to cut out pieces of reality with the camera
lens.” Thanks to photography, from which it descends, at least in the shooting phase in
which one thing is captured after another, “cinema continues to draw on the imagefragment
for its raw material”. Cinema imagery carries collage to its ultimate consequences:
it fragments reality in frames, to subsequently rebuild reality in the editing room. In a
nutshell: deconstructing and reconstructing.
Collage, assembly and interjoining demand enormous responsibility of artists (even the
responsibility of “aiding change”, to use Daniel Spoerri’s lucid expression); they must
exercise absolute freedom of choice in clustering and relating (voluntarily or otherwise) the
pieces of a wholly open puzzle.
In this logic of combining everything with everything, collage assumes (and exercises) an
aesthetic of non-coherence. Thus, Barcala brought together fragments of unmatched, even
non-harmonious materials (“sometimes I see a piece of wood that I like and just pick it up”
he would say) in a real painting, in a way that made the reality itself of the work
disconcerting. Collage bends, but does not break, the bond with reality and thus acquires
an autonomy that other languages lack. The fact that Barcala’s elements extend into infinity
gives rise to the unlimited renovation of his gestures and the forms that are to emerge from
them. This heterogeneity rules out any linear or unique reading, insofar as it stimulates a
mosaic-like view characteristic of this age of signs and signals. This is the result, among
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