Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

others, of the advent of the mathematical theory of chaos, which addresses unstable
(chaotic) systems in a society in which the simple becomes complex and certainties of the
past are today’s uncertainties. No work can now be perceived under a single gaze:
numerous interpretations are admitted as the outcome, in turn, of plural fragmentation.
More than anything else, and even from the time of the early Estaciones de ferrocarril, for
Barcala matter was a weighty, constant, expressive and autonomous, refined and lyrical
presence, one that would turn wild in the latter works. Dense pigment would give way to
the use of materials, cast-offs, the obsolete, the dregs, the inescapable fate of all consumer
goods. Barcala added that he found them “through a long process of personal decanting. I,
of course, like all painters who study in academies began as a classical figurative artist; I even
won two second prizes for historical paintings [...]. But little by little I was drawn away from
the artificial world of pictorial dimensions and towards the integral presence of matter
itself” which, as Bachelard sustained, is “the unconscious of form”. In the works of this
period, Barcala used broken fragments of materials (including fragments of paintings
destroyed by the author?) together with paint and instead of it, which obliged him to adopt
a working method (earlier we referred to sewing as a drawing technique) completely
outside any norm known before then, a working method that tends to dilute the bounds
between genres, between rationality and chaos, between art and life.
Barcala knew that the strength of collage lies not in its power of representation, but in its
capacity to propose “all the possible virtualities” intrinsic in materials. For that very reason
he asserted: “the material I use lends emphatic power [to the work] that is later hard to
forfeit”, and would probably have concurred with Robert Morris in that material, in and of
itself, has vitality and form. But, how does the artist handle material or behave when
working with objects? Barcala would appear to propose that paintings cease to be windows
on the world to become part of the world.
Barcala felt that he was a “painter despite the bodiliness of my materials... little by little you
leave anecdote behind and concentrate on the media, the paint itself, the paint-paint. Every
material has its own natural colour and becomes a part of a palette which, if you blend it
well, becomes a work of art”.
There is a conceptual, one might even say Duchampian, aspect present in his work, along
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