Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

memento mori, which proposed a - sometimes melancholy - metaphor about the futility of
worldly things and success, about the transience, the brevity, the finiteness of life; about
decomposition and the perennial nature of death, that impossibility of all possibilities.
The evolution of the vanitas from the seventeenth to the twentieth century spans a range
of possibilities from an art form that believed it was eternal (Vita brevis, ars longa, as Seneca
would say, due to the durability of what was represented) to one that would become
ephemeral. “I love to imagine a sort of art” Baudelaire wrote “in which durability is replaced
by ephemerality”.
Jan Bialostocki ends Arte y Vanitas, (Art and vanitas), his excellent essay on the iconography
of the vanitas, on the following note: “The art of our times waives representation of the
world of perishable beauty, subject to laws of mortality, and has built its own broad, unreal
and nearly unknown world which, due precisely to its unreality, is apparently indestructible.
There is every indication that this world is the latest ‘positive’ creation to arise from the
old idea behind the vanitas.”
Hence, the former vanitas iconography - a human skull, a lit candle, a clock - gave way to
consumer society articles, bringing on renovation pioneered, among others, by Warhol and
Gerhard Richter, Arman, Spoerri, Piero Manzoni and Broodthaers, who addressed
contemporary mythology. Moreover, in today’s world the urban scenario would appear to
play the role formerly reserved to tables (as the repository for still lifes, now real), with real
materials replacing painted objects.
Barcala’s boxes signify a renovation of the traditional vanitas. First of all, they are tridimensional,
although not sculptural. They hold memories, represent the unconscious.
Indeed, these boxes may be a new version of vanitas art, in return for older specimens (such
as made by Valdés Leal, for instance). Drawing an analogy to the native Americans who
returned an - apparently naive - heterodox version of Baroque art, known as metis Baroque,
to Europe, Barcala’s boxes might be regarded to be “metis vanitas”.
Whereas in the European vanitas skulls were adorned with bouquets of flowers and clocks
and so on (materialisation of covert symbols) and sumptuously painted, Washington
Barcala’s Uruguayan vanitas are reduced to the inclusion of cast-offs: little strips of wood,
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