Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

with a touch of nihilism so light as to be unpronounceable. While this nihilism, together
with the experimental nature of Barcala’s work, would appear to associate it closely with
Klee’s, the two nonetheless differ insofar as the Swiss artist’s paintings have a basic
structure, a characteristic common to his entire production, while Barcala’s works do not.
The Uruguayan found - or failed to find - a structure for each work (and when he failed, he
destroyed them). Since Barcala did not employ apriorisms, he did not impose his will on the
act of setting fragments in place: once he placed them next to one another, he left the rest
to chance, letting them arrange themselves on their own, waiting to see what would come
of these random unions. Barcala built a method (nearly) randomly, to the extent that he
would have been able to subscribe to Pollock’s confession: “When I’m in my painting I don’t
realise what I’m doing. It’s only after I ‘regain consciousness’ that I see where I wanted to
go” 3 . But in Barcala’s case this is a “special chance, characteristic of the nature of the
material used”, as Jean Dubuffet would say in his Notas (Notes). Barcala’s system, then, is
the unforeseeable, the arbitrariness of endless pursuit with his covert logic (logic?) and his
accidents determined by chance, as in a throw of the dice. His system was to be the
inconstant, inconsistent and unconscious translation of a world divested of stable values.
Matter and substance
Until 1980 Barcala used primarily black and white and “in a few works” the artist noted “I used
only different tones of white”. After that date, warm colours began to make their appearance,
yellows, oranges, vermilions, which would gradually become louder in his latter works.
His elements are irreplaceable. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, it might be assumed that
yellow is yellow is yellow. But this is so only in the world of ideas or for the colours in the
spectrum. Actually there are two other issues: the colour used by the artist, the result of
the mix of the pigment with the paste, and the colour of raw materials: gold is not pure
yellow, because it is clouded by its geological origin, since “colour is where our brain and
the universe meet” as Paul Klee wisely sustained. It is not a matter, then, of colours that
“are a semblance of the colours of nature” (Merleau Ponty), but of colour as dimension, the
dimension that creates (from itself to itself) identities, differences, a texture, materiality,
something. “Colour” Barcala said “appears together with matter”, to the extent that the
coloured paste comes alive, becomes “a being”.
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