Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

Informalism and Constructivism
In traditional art, the structure of a painting was articulated around perspective, with the
addition of random elements that elude geometry such as, for instance, clouds, that drama
unresolved by Renaissance painting. Had they known fractal geometry, that is, the geometry
of totally irregular forms, instead of only Euclidean geometry, Renaissance artists would not
have been baffled by the problem of including clouds or mountains in their paintings since
such elements can be described under the former discipline “with quantitative rigour and
vigour” (Mandelbrot).
Why is geometry regarded to be “cold” and “boring”? asked Benoît Mandelbrot, the
inventor of fractal geometry. “One of the reasons lies in its incapacity to describe the form
of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline, a tree. Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones,
coastlines are not circles, tree bark is not smooth and light does not travel in a straight line.”
But when Barcala was painting, fractal geometry had not yet been invented, and so he could
only separate two worlds that he would maintain in dialectic tension. On the one hand, the
informal world made up of pasted clippings, recovering his earlier experience in the
cardboard factory when he was in contact with material things. On the other, the world of
geometry: while ripping up perspective as a tool, he converted it into a tangible with little
slats of wood; he played at geometry with pieces of wood. The dotted line was itself a
rational element (so much so that draughtsmen had a drawing tool - a little wheel and a
ruler - that they used for this purpose); but Barcala, rather than drawing, stitched the dots
in with a sewing machine.
Thus, Barcala’s paintings formalise considerable tension between two systems: on the one
hand, the forms of matter, which in traditional terminology could be equated to the
background, comprising a base of fragments of flat materials and paint and conveyed in
frankly Informalist language (when incorporating facts, the artist worked with a nearly
incommunicable perception for handling the formless); on the other, the slats of wood
(sticks, rods), which can be seen as the figure, made from modest tri-dimensional elements
with which he built his peculiar geometry, a certain Constructivism that he superimposed
on the background of his paintings, delimiting their expressiveness. The forms that navigate
through that background are sometimes subordinate to the structure of the sticks (such as
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