Rafael Barrios
Author: Sonia Casanova
ArtNexus No. 69 - Jun 2008
|  | A long time, devoted to the activity of building monumental sculptures and exhibiting his work abroad, has passed since Rafael Barrios’ last personal show in Venezuela. The artist, widely recognized and a staple of our everyday life thanks to his levitating volumes in public spaces, tells us a secret, making us part of his creative inner sanctum with the exhibition of ideas and experiments from his weightlessness workshop, where iron defeats gravity and color is in the atmosphere.
Rafael Barrios wants to transform his viewers through perception. He points towards a profound artistic experience, the experience he intuits when confronted with the work of the Great Masters. He says: “Just by standing in front of that object called art, I am bettered as a thinker.” The intention is for there to be a before and an after, and for the sensorial relationship with the work of art not to invoke memories or require rationalizations in order to change us.
Geometric forms of virtual spatiality, dismissive of gravitational forces, are features in the work of this artist; they create illusions of ascent or frozen fall in vibrantly colored lacquered iron. These are his invention and his mark. In other times, it was dislocated forms and performances overflowing with color. He has been labeled a conceptualist, an information and perception artist, a kinetic artist, a deconstructivist. In every movement he has been a part of, he stood out for a profound exploration of the basic elements of the work of art: form, color, volume, space, and the way we perceive them.
Exhibited in Laboatorio are six levitating medium-format volumes that have the particularity of being entirely white. The seem to ascend like crystal vapors, like geometric clouds. Achromy makes volume protagonic and amplifies shadows. Forms regain their importance and are like a drawing, deprived of the attraction of color. The artist says that his monumental works appear after years of reflection, seven at least. The works in Laboratorio are younger than that. The nimbus and dislocated verticals, both terms used, with variations, to title the works, are an exquisite oddity for this artist, perfect in its format. From white we move on to volumes painted in a variety of grays, which create the illusion of shadows and transparencies in works like Virtual, 2007. The shadow, previously pure and now manipulated, gives force and dynamism to the composition and depth in space.
Both because of its absence and of its vibrant presence, color is subject to experiments. A fan, its white blades facing the viewer and the colored ones facing the wall, creates a circumference of colors. Color is, then, not the attribute of a physical object but a form in itself, and a halo appears as a retinal effect. Aspas, 2001, is a wink and a tribute to Carlos Cruz-Díez, with whom Barrios has a relationship of friendship and admiration.
Weightlessness and elevation are constant theme; Espiral, 1999, is its point of exacerbation. The spatial curve stands out in a geometry if straight lines and by the movement of the suspended form. For the artist, “spirals are subliminal in themselves,” signs of the passage from one state to another and, projected into space, a directional call to elevation. An limited ascent in that it begins, grows, and closes, returning movement. It ascends and returns to the ground.
Barrios’ experimentation encompasses techniques and materials as figures of plastic experience. We mostly know Barrios’ works in lacquered iron and are startled to see coming out of the workshop a luminous, light-weight Tapiz, 2007, in perforated steel, cut into sheets and wire-stitched. Is like a translucent parallelogram veil, present by way of gleams and reflections, through which we see the background.
Another novelty are the works in two-dimensional formats that deal with the illusion of space, color, and movement on the plane. “I don’t do flat works,” the artist says. Thus the space we perceive is real, even if it doesn’t respond to three-dimensional coordinates.
Rafael Barrios wanted to share ideas and works of art that are excellent but rather unknown, works that were waiting for the artist to deem them mature enough for exhibition. Some lines of investigation will continue, others will change: time will tell. Visitors at Laboratorio were privileged witnesses of their apparition. Many projects and drawings are resting in the workshop, the evidences of a thought devoted to changing the world. This show reveals for us the complex and rich work of the creator of illusions. In that sense, the artist’s laboratory resembles that of a magician.
|  |
| |
|
 |
 |
|
