José BARRIAS (1944)

In an introductory note to the organisation of his work, José Barrias explains that he discovered the structural features of his work in Obstbuch/O Livro dos Frutos (1972-73), these being: the cyclical cadence, the awareness of the work of art as legacy, the addition of fragments within a polysemic, interactive and ongoing system. All these features are related to the conviction, according to a quotation by Umberto Eco, which Barrias holds dear, “men, since the beginning of humanity, tell stories” as an attempt “to shape the turmoil of experience”.

The artist’s oeuvre is structured on the pivot of time and narrative: the project as memory and memory as narrative. The urgency of the present is always accompanied by its insufficiency. Cycles, even if they are autonomous, continuously refer to an oscillatory movement, a sway replete in it internal reciprocity and correlations, which makes each exhibition a variation on the theme of memory, a different repetition.

Barrias’s work is strongly marked by existential examination. In Nel Mondo (1995), an emblematic instance of this inquiry, a ladder (proximity) and a monocle (distance) interact with a large semi-spherical wall covered with images from his universe.

The exhibition Meridiano, held in 1990 at the EMI-Valentim de Carvalho gallery, formed a part of the cycle (and book) entitled Tempo (Time). Barrias exhibited the keel of a boat and various paintings with a binary or ternary rhythm, where the figure of tumult, with vortices and spirals, evokes water, wind and time itself.

With a tale by Tabucchi and under the aegis of Leonardo da Vinci (The Great Flood) and Rilke (“objects of art are always the result of having been in danger”); the book is an object of careful staging. There is something baroque in the artist’s taste for the spiral movement, the enigma and the surprise of form.
The installation Barragem (Dam), exhibited for the first time in Paris in 1980, is another clear example of the artist’s relationship with the world of remains. Barragem is founded on the revelation of the re-emerging beauty of a sunken place: the ruins of Vilarinho das Furnas. The immobile stones contrast with the mobility of the breeze, evoked by the silk curtains placed between passage-ways. As Barrias declared in an interview in 1992, the act of exorcising the limit confirms the strict relationship we maintained with it.

Another way of interpreting time as passage (see Pas Sages, 1980, for instance) can be identified with the centrality that the concept of inheritance occupies in the artist’s work. A Imagem da Sombra (The Image of Shade, 1994) is an example of this: the sequence begins with a mirrored self-portrait of Miguel Barrias, his father, who was also a painter and transmitted ways of being and doing to his son (how to be an artist, how to make art…).

Vestígios (Remnants), an open cycle form 1997, is marked by the heterogeneous use of expressive mediums: the manipulation of “found objects”, drawings, quotations by poets the artist admires and paintings– works of a hybrid nature. In Piccolo Mondo (1995), from the cycle Nostalgia de Passagem (Nostalgia of Passing), the figure of maternity is portrayed by declaredly referring to the maternity painted by Piero della Francesca, La Sacra Conversazione.

When Barrias quotes Leonardo da Vinci or Paolo Ucello, his most preferred poets, or writes Fernando Pessoa’s Ode Marítima on the slate walls of the poet’s room (1995), profound history and circumstantial histories encounter each other without hierarchy.

But time is also pause and fragmentation, discontinuity and occasionality. Quase Romance (Almost Romance, 1973-86), a sequence of drawings, paintings and watercolour paintings, refers to this coexistence by manipulating the image of a postcard (the work’s formal and mnemonic matrix) in a mirror.
Barrias undertakes the matter of half-light in his Noitiário (1983-84), examining the transition of day to night, the passage of sleep to dream, the motion of brightness to darkness…

In Nostos, o Regresso (Nostos, The Return), Barrias deals with the Nietzschean issues of return and the fatherland as the place that redirects us to another deferred, alien and familiar place. Perhaps death can also be thought of in this way: the deferred place of life. Both (death and life) are referred to in Os Embaixadores (The Ambassadors, 1978-87), a work inspired by a famous painting by Hans Holbein (wherein an anamorphic device serves to project a hidden skull across the foreground, thereby disclosing that which is concealed in life). As Barrias states, his most privileged relationship is the one he maintains with the limited flow of life.

LEONOR NAZARÉ