Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

plastically in such a way that, in context, they’re seen differently; while never ceasing to be
what they are, they acquire another expressive dimension”. And he finished by saying “Beyond
making a statement on the universal nature of order, my intention is to sensitise the very
humble media that I use to express these stories”. But, what stories? Why, here is no narration
or event at all. Barcala calls these works stories, certainly a paradoxical way to refer to these
nearly self-referring paintings which, at first glance, appear to lack any plot at all.
What kind of materials did Barcala use? The artist himself noted: “I intend to lend artistic
value to lowly things, wood, cloth and other very modest elements, cast-offs that I collect
and later harmonise. I try to order spaces with colour and materials in what, according to
a critic in Barcelona, constitutes sculpture-paintings, because in my works the pictorial
clearly predominates over the sculptural. In summary, my job might be defined to be that
of a sensitiser of spaces and materials”.
Since Barcala’s language is not only the language of painting, but also flows over into other
disciplines, he could be regarded to be a painter of limits, of boundaries. Before, each
genre was what it was; now, thanks to IT technologies, the limits between determinism and
apparent chaos in material systems have expired and domains as naturally distant as pure
mathematics and the visual arts overlap, the boundaries between traditional genres are
blurred. Now they spill over, invade and corrode one another’s territories and it is in the
interstitial areas between genres (the space for human dialogue is also generated
between two parties) that new art should arise, art that does not fit into any of the codes
previously established for each genre, but which crosses them all, prompting artists to take
a fresh look at their surroundings and themselves.
What may be derived from these languages is the possibility of transforming the surface into
a discontinuous, unlimited texture with no outlines, something close to Joseph Cornell’s
lyrical vision. It follows that one can speak of the poetics of discontinuity.
Barcala’s boxes are today’s vanitas
Ultimately, the paintings we have been analysing are an updated version of the vanitas
(denomination taken from a verse in Ecclesiastes, 1:2, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”), or
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