Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

Barcala often referred to ordered elements “order, balance out, create the sensation of
permanence, leave sensitive marks, dynamic and vivid structures, these are all inalienable
values for me, values that reinforce the power and suggestive strength of the image”; but I
would add, that orderliness is stratified. In a painting, stratified perspective moves backward,
towards the vanishing point, but Barcala replaced the virtual scenic cube with a real box:
spatiality arises from relief and the painting appears through allusion, from colour staining.
“Erasing, be it either by crossing over or blotching out (think of Pierre Soulages, Hans
Hartung or Robert Motherwell), is an essential theme, drawn on by all or nearly all the
poetics of Informalism”, as Argan would say.
Arte povera
Informal is not tantamount to formless. Informal alludes to the rejection of form. Two
philosophies influenced Informalism: phenomenology, which studies phenomena as they
appear in experience, and existentialism, which stresses the primacy of existence over
essence, in direct opposition to the rational and mathematical spirit according to which
“existence is inseparable from astonishment”, as Gabriel Marcel asserted.
Informalism breaks the spatial tenets of traditional painting and is inextricably linked to
everyday experience; hence the constitutive importance of material in Barcala’s work. “Art
should spring from the material and the tool” Renato Barilli would say “and must preserve
the trace of the tool and its struggle with matter. Artists must express themselves, but so
must their tool, so must their material [...]. Each material has a language of its own.”
Germano Celant, the inventor of arte povera, characterised this movement as “an artistic
moment that tends to take art back to a preiconographic state; it is a hymn to banal and
primary elements, a free artistic, nearly intuitive act, that relegates mimesis to a secondary
functional event [...]”. Barcala would appear to concur, resorting in the end to elements of this
nature: “The materials are always modest. I always choose wood, crude cloth or thread for
my works and sometimes I include oilskin because of the ‘muffled shine’ on this material.
These are, then, more natural and warmer materials than plastic or metal, which are the result
of industrial processing”. For that reason, he added “Presently [the quote is from 1980] I’m
concerned with textures, working with ‘modest’ materials and transforming these elements
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