Catálogo de la exposición - Fundación César Manrique

artist he eluded figurative nature, he was nonetheless going to die close to nature. This
painting is, irrefutably, a vanitas.
Across his entire oeuvre, the little rods or sticks in his paintings are always intact, except in
the latter works, where they are broken, and instead of following a rational pattern, Barcala
used them to trace chaotically scribbled lines, which may be interpreted to be a symbol of
the infinite; the scribbling is a bit like the flourish on a will. The horizon in his (by then)
distant notes on Las Palmas is broken. There is a sort of regression here to his earlier
drawings: he returns to the line on the horizon, although the horizon is fractured. Because
in his weakened health he knew that the dark evil winds had begun to blow (one of the texts
in Uruguay natural en Punta del Este).
Barcala, like his fellow countryman Rafael Barradas before him, may have returned to
Montevideo to confront his illness, agony and death.
——o——
Barcala knew that his was hermetic art and admitted: “Yes, of course. You have to feel the
order, the subtleties of tiny elements to be able to like and understand the role they play in
the work”. He could have subscribed Andréi Tarkovski’s assertion that “an artistic image
should be indecipherable”. But a hermetic endeavour calls, in turn, for a viewer willing to
make the ascetic effort to be able to understand it. That is why the highest praise for his
work came from enthusiasts who were either artists or art critics: Argentinean Sarah Grilo,
Rafael Canogar, Gerardo Rueda, Lucio Muñoz, Luis Gordillo, Fernando Huici and Francisco
Calvo Serraller, to name a few.
1 Unofficial translation. T.N.
2 Translated from the Spanish. T.N.
3 Re-translated into English from the Spanish text. T.N.
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