Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

pieces of cardboard, scraps of twine, fragments of used canvas; materials that possess the
obviousness of the immanent and which are in themselves an exercise in perishability.
These boxes might even be regarded to be coffins, in which Valdés Leal and Medieval
Spanish art surreptitiously survive. (It was not by chance that the Uruguayan artist took
refuge in Madrid where “I found the medium that allows me to build my work”.) The head,
half-smothered in inert matter, in Goya’s Perro semihundido (The dog on the leash) seems to
be present in a detail of the painting with which Barcala won second prize in the 1957
competition titled “Arrival of the colonists at the port of Montevideo on 19 November
1726 on the ship ‘Nuestra Señora de la Encina”. The small head in the picture - probably a
portrait of Carlos Federico Sáez - that survives in a vast space apparently intending to
swallow it up, is a triple tribute: to Goya, to Sáez and to the Sáez Group to which the artist
himself belonged. But that is precisely why this black painting appealed to Barcala: because
the dog was sunk in a formless mass: everything in Barcala’s boxes is sunken: brushstrokes,
drawing, technique, seams... And when a figure is insinuated, it is only because the artist
needs to communicate his anguish. In spite of this, he let hope glimmer through in the form
of this incipient anthropomorphic detail that apparently is able to survive all the destruction,
a detail that would assume an increasingly more important role over the years.
But not everything is devoured by disorder: reason still exists. Mi viaje (My trip), for
instance, depicts a classic jai-alai court, with letters, numbers, references to trips, quotes:
Barcala, like Proust, could have even included the laundry list.
The sarcasm dwelling in the self-destructive machines created by the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely
is also present in Barcala’s work, but in this case, softened with a touch of fondness.
As mentioned above, the travel notes that document Barcala’s stay in Las Palmas and Lisbon
echo the drawings of the European travelling painters who visited to America. But since,
unlike them, Barcala was a traveller who never returned (with the exception of his final trip
when he returned to die, he only went back to Uruguay for occasional brief visits), he lost
the vision that anchors an artist in his place; that would explain why the horizon in the
works painted in his latter years is broken, because it was then that he felt his loss, his
death. In the end, he allowed himself a sad, solitary and final irony, including a graffiti in one
of his later paintings that reads: “Uruguay, au naturel”.
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