Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

The common denominator of Barcala’s matter is its “cardboardiness” (if we may be allowed
the neologism), associated with his experience in his family’s factory. Merleau Ponty
wonders “How might we define exactly the colour of an object without mentioning the
substance of which it is made, for example, the blue in a rug without saying that it is
‘woolish blue” and added “Cézanne had posed the question: how to distinguish colour from
drawing in things?”
Barcala’s vision of colour-matter is an example of a vision shared with engravers or tapestry
weavers for whom, as we noted above, the sense of touch is the first consideration.
Form is normally quantitative. But Barcala brought a qualitative feature to the materials he
used. A piece of string set next to a slat of wood can never be just a string. If, on the
contrary, the two were represented in a still life painted by the Florentine school, for
instance, the light would have smoothed over the composition as a whole. But when Barcala
used oil paint to colour a piece of wood (as if it had just been pulled out of the tin of paint),
the colour was intended as an intrinsic feature of the wood incorporated into the work.
Thus, if a piece of paper was written on, even if it was just the laundry list (that Marcel
Proust made famous), in Barcala’s work it also acquired a qualitative value, and even more
so if it was overlapped by patterned slats of wood that, in this case, played the same role
as perspective drawing.
Modern painters do not paint series, the way the impressionists used to; Barcala either. But
even had he been so inclined he would have been unable to do so, since the procedure he
used to articulate the materials that went into his boxes made it impossible, because he
renewed it with each new work: his method was more inductive than deductive.
Barcala ended one interview by saying: “My work is made of silence, private mystery, peace
of mind. It is a far cry from the flamboyance characteristic of the denunciation [of consumer
society] because it reflects my personality. I’m very introverted and observant and my
artistic expression is analytical and sensitive, the contrary of other enormously
temperamental painters who create gestural works”.
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