artnexus #93

The exhibition Álvaro Barrios la leyenda del sueño is a retrospective review of the work of the renowned Colombian artist (Cartagena, 1945). The show covers a half-century of Barrios’ career, which began in the mid-1960s. Within the thematic and technical diversity that characterizes Barrios, his interest in the world of dreams and the occult stands out, displaying a unique connection with everyday life and the possibility that the world of dreams coexists with the material world, and creating a complex conceptual universe with his installations. 

Barrios’ exploration of the problematic relationships generated in the oceans that circumscribe Latin America is inscribed in that context. His earliest work in that direction was created for the 7th Paris Biennial in 1971, the construction of his Mar Caribe. This work was remade in 2004 for the San Juan Poly/graphic Triennial, situating the coordinates that separate Puerto Rico from the United Stated but also showing how the same seas connect the island with the rest of Latin America. El mar de las Malvinas, featured in the retrospective, documents the conflict between Great Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands, visualizing it through the use of maps that situate the area, images of Eva Perón, Elizabeth II of England, and Margaret Thatcher as antagonistic figures, blue on one side and red on the other, that hang from the ceiling to embody the disparity between the intense color of the ocean and the redness of the blood spilled in the war.

The work on our cover, El mar de Cristóbal Colón (2013) is an investigation along the same lines and was created specifically for this retrospective. The symbolic duality of red and blue once again alludes to the contrast between the beauty of the ocean space and the deaths caused by each one of Columbus’ journeys to the conquered territories, journeys recorded in a grid traced by Barrios on a map of Colon’s maritime crossings. This project shines a light on a multifaceted oeuvre that moves in the direction of the basis of conceptualism, which the artist has been so keen on exploring.

IVONNE PINI