Portfolio 2021//
Daniel Barclay
Disaster : crossing lines, blurred limits
2004
This Project was final work at the MFA at Central Saint Martins in 2004. It involved a series of works developed around the themes of political violence in Perú and representation of this violence. The number 69,000 on the foam piece, represents the first estimated number of persons killed or dissapeared during the internal conflict in Peru, given by the Peruvian Truth Commission and Reconciliation Report (2003). I did 69’000 cuts to the foam piece with a cutter. The cuts are intended to give the piece a performative element of representation. The overall work was designed as an interdisciplinary installation that reflect on the representation of violence related to political and poetic narratives. The work is inspired on the text “The writing of the disaster” by Maurice Blanchot and tries to describe what cannot be represented because of its magnitude and destructiveness.
Jaguar Mask Project
2004
The performance Journey to Trafalgar Square (Jaguar mask Project) was made as a project of the MFA Central Saint Martins program. The idea of the performance was to make a journey traveling a geographical space from the School in Charing Cross Road to the center of London, stopping at the National Portrait Gallery. The concept was of a Journey interrupted, unable to reach the center (Trafalgar Square). For the performance I performed a character that represents the face of a precolumbian ceramic, and embodies the idea of a representation of an animal and an entity of pre-columbian origin. The mask was made after studying several preColumbian ceramics at the British museum. The performance deals with the representation of violence and identity in LatinAmerica and how these representations are unable to reach the center in the cultural system. The work was based on the text “The writing of the disaster� by Maurice Blanchot. In it the representation of violence is diffuse and not a linear narrative. In that sense the performance was an overlapping of several elements like preColumbian imaginary and identity, violence and representation, and center periphery dynamics.
Images: Lam Tung Pang
Banana Republic
Der Freie Wille Festival Berlin 2005
The movements of my jaw create a paradigm of destruction/creation /consumption/rejection between my body and the banana material. Using bananas as a metaphor for phallocentric power, my body negotiates between the attraction of an ideal and rejection of its results. The transformation of the banana into chewed matter and its resulting new condition refers to the materialization of ideas and the unexpected directions they may take. The performance deals with a Third World banana-republic utopia in terms of its own contradictions. There is a background drawing on a wall commenting on the representation of national heroes or leaders, and the performance itself. which takes one day. results in a mass of chewed banana spread out on a sheet of black plastic.
performance Tumorrow
Tumay
Apartamento de Arte 2010
Induction Text If we can analyze geography and how it forms us, deform us and shape us, we could place the Morro in the Peruvian psyche as accidents both geographical and of our graphic memory. A present part/a lost part. In our collective memory it’s remembered the amputated extent, as a mutilated person feels his limb present. The memory of a hero throwing himself into the void visualizes perhaps a moment that is repeated in the school texts, frozen in time. Our identity is tied (or untied) to the Morro. Those images, those falls, seem to precede our own leaps into the void, undertaken almost by force, as immigrants of our memory. That tip of land that seems to step into the sea, seems to catch also the past, which seems present, confusing one with the other. At times amnesia (persecuted) at others obsession (persecute). This performance is established as a form of process of retrieving the notion of belonging, through the simulation of body positions, from the representations of scenes exemplified in different pictures and photographs of what preceded between the 1879 and 1883 in Peru. The idea of this process is to work with the images, in a therapeutic way. They will be staged in a contemplative way, such as some of the meditation or yoga workshops, positions of the body extracted and selected from photos and paintings that record scenes of loss and violence as of heroic acts. The movements of the images will be physically reproduced. From Alfonso Ugarte's depictions of body positions to a Bolognesi on the ground, to positions taken from battle frames, the depictions of lootings by Etna Velarde as well as photos of anonymous soldiers. Through the body positions it is intended to meditate about our identification with these images, awake the memory, remove the trauma. On January 13, 1881, after the Morro Solar was taken, it is said that some troops who were not taken prisoner retreated down the cliffs of Chorrillos towards Miraflores. It is through this route, but in reverse, that we will proceed to advance towards the Morro Solar, to perform there the positions tested in this workshop. Note: We will advance in double line, walking in an orderly manner. In the workshop ten positions will be worked, each position made on the Morro will last approximately three minutes.
Once in the Morro, we will form in lines of between 10 to 20 people, one line after another, saving distance to be able to stretch, and all the lines behind me (DB). In the actions we try to carry an order in which all people represent the same position at the same time, then proceed to change position. Positions will be repeated in the order in which they were given in the workshop (You should be attentive to my position and to the people in front, it is necessary to keep your eyes open during positions to be aware of changes of positions.)
Daniel Barclay
Images: Adriana Navarro
aire caliente /hot air
La ex - culpable 2011
“The motivations of this project are associated to a necessity in discussing the horizontality in the social relations by means of a work that involves the spectator in the participation of an action/performance of symbolic meaning and sculptural character. By means of a set of instructions, the public is invited to realize a repetitive action of inflating prophylactic devices and tied them with a cord to the rings of a metal structure. This structure is composed of two columns, one vertical and the other annexed in a diagonal position, making reference to two things; a vertical order and a deviation from that totemic verticality. The encapsulation of air in the prophylactic devices and its repetition, contains the construction of times and of wearing down in a volatile volumetry. From its symbolism as regulator of relations, the latex is converted in a material of changing meanings. The name hot air contains a symbolization in the representation of the eros up to the void in the object subtracted from its sexual functionality. The hot/warm as a gesture of what is not real, a reference to the sensational and the spectacular, or the overrepresentation and its negative. The passing of time is registered by the natural decay of the inflated prophylactic devices. The additive character of the interaction of the public produce an inverse process of social cohesion. In a way, the work is constructed by the accumulation of breaths. The symbolism of this elements in their interaction with the public talks about the construction of a common space, while by the means of an action of ritual characteristics we come back to the personal in an act and its repetition. As a parallel part, there are works that build a map of personal spaces that form part of the series “trópicos sólidos/materia oscura” realized in Sao Paulo that contrasts the skin with the territory and its frontiers. A tropical palette is utilized to represent the stereotypes of “warm”, and the fragmentations of the kaleidoscopic images procure a new view of this representation.”
Daniel Barclay
Aire caliente Iron structure, cords, prophylactic devices 2m x 1.20m 2011
CartografĂas
Oil on gesso over cardboard 1.80m x 1.80m 2011
Materia Oscura
photography 1.80m x 1.80m
2010
Piel
Pencil and gesso over wood panel 2.07m x 1.88m 2011
Estratificaciones culturales
GalerĂa Revolver 2014
At the same time that Barclay's work reveals layers and sociocultural strata of one or more nations, the artist reminds us that we carry certain political burdens (and faults) of the country in which we are born, even when we are not at all agreed with them. In this sense, it is necessary to remember that an individual is not defined by his passport, but it is necessary to question the certainties that nationalism demands and questioning the idea of Fatherland. The artist seeks to exhume a kind of "underground nationalism" impregnated in his roots, in an attempt to build it’s own identity, formed also with interference from other cultures and without the supremacy of a hegemony, breaking physical and ideological boundaries and building symbolic spaces to make different territories and languages permeable. This thought materializes in the drawings and flags of the installation titled "Banderas Apåtridas".
fragment of text by Paula Borghi
Estratificaciones Culturales mdf, enamel, gesso, glue, iron, cutted books 2.40m x 2.40m x 50cm 2014
Bandera MĂşltiplo
Wood, enamel, gesso 8 pieces 1.30m x 50cm
2014
Linea divisรณria
Oil and gesso on canvas panels. Variable dimensions. 2014
Espacio negativo Oil and gesso on canvas, wood
2m x 1.50m
2014
Reconstrucciรณn
Oil and gesso on canvas, wood
Banderas apรกtridas
Enamel, mdf
3m x 1.30m 2014
Variable dimensions 2014
Jornais
Gesso on newspapers
2014
Substratos
Watercolor, pencil over cardboard
2014
Bambaísmo
Sala Luis Miroquesada Garland
2015
"Ainda vão me matar numa rua. Quando descobrirem, principalmente, que faço parte dessa gente que pensa que a rua é a parte principal da cidade."
Paulo Leminski; Toda Poesia - [quarenta clics em Curitiba; 1976]
The abstract quality of Bamba's meaning can be presented by the spanish american language in numerous cultural and historical contexts. From the colloquial adjective as it has been employed most recently in Perú, which means false, adulterated, even to a certain attribution of objectual instability associated with feminine nouns, feeling in which something sometimes is kept out of its perfect balance by force of events, in the brazilian sense of its use (see corda bamba; pernas bambas). With the grouping of this set of works in the exhibition of Daniel Barclay, the word bamba is brought here as if to make possible the layout of a parallel of instance between these two initial places, where we now temporarily pass to access and Observe. In brazil, Bamba is popularly used to designate an exempted expert in a particular activity or issue, someone very good at what he does. Or even a brave and determined person, a true bambambã. As a concept, it is sufficiently interesting that there are so many interrelated interpretations of culture, with so different variations for the same word, signifier and Meaning. The origin of bamba is located at the beginning of colonial times, during the reign of the Spanish Catholic kings Isabel and Fernando, and has spread throughout the Canary Islands and Central America. It called the action of altering existing currencies, superimposing new values, when it was customary to change the surface of the original for the copy. This trick of falsification has evolved, over time, from a numismatic code for manufacturing Made in China on a massive scale, with the actuality of technical and digitally inexpensive reproductions pirate - products and goods of a national and foreign informative nature which, however, arise in the informal market and in the street at the retail level, without in any way circumscribing plagiarism. The format is that of magazines, books, albums, multiple publications and brochures, editorials, Dvds, Cds, etc. They are
only unofficial copies of an original matrix, which happen to be defined clandestinely as a serial copy, copy of the copy or runs of poorly made text and print images. In a radical opposite, the history of art at the service of institutional museology establishes by their own parameters the category and the value of the original, which causes strong prominence for some masterpieces in the storage rooms, under the protection of the collections, which remain closed for subsequent exhibitions, ¡never of imitation! It remains for the visitor to be satisfied (or not) with the menu of posters and postcards of the souvenir shop of the major museums. Anthropophagy, whose cultural phenomenon has been in development in Brazil since the 1920s, proclaims that by changing the value of an original object, what really happens is that a whole logic of validation of the support system for such codes is put in jeopardy, thus generating a new symbolic value, what comes to question the order of signs and implies a transmission and reproduction of meaning, transforming the nature of its legitimacy. Intrinsically, the bamba object has two sides: because of the economy of the manufacturing of its structure, the “negative” and the “original” which transgresses the sign, producing until it loses sight of copy after copy, and other readings from the distant matrix.
Bamba objects are legally unclassifiable and attend the human impulse to rationally categorize the world, allowing the latency of forms to establish a dominion over real life. The free commercialization of some elements of preColumbian culture (huacos), in addition to problematizing the industry-sized counterfeiting and distribution strand, translates aspects of culture that have been repressed in the course of historical and social processes. From certain angles, and with that understanding of mentalities behind, the hypothesis formulated by the artist Daniel Barclay for this show relates to the imagination of narratives and the construction of a syncretic vision around them. Resuming public programs and alternative modes of exhibition of what is not yet found in museums, but in the streets, Bambaísmo intends to insert into these days a space of reflection and investigation dedicated to the aesthetic practices of assimilation of the so-called popular visual culture in the field of art.
Marcio Harum Images: Juan Pablo Murrugarra
Bamba
Oil and pencil on canvas, iron
1m x 1.50m
2015
4 copias
Acrylic on wood, iron
Variable dimensions
2015
Camelo
Oil and acrylic on canvas
Variable dimensions 2015
Nueva colecciรณn de arte 4m x 1m x 75cm 2015
Gesso, cuted books, wood, glue, iron
Fallidos Gesso, precolumbian ceramic reproductions, mdf 3.92m x 1.64m x 30cm 2015
Museo
Oil on canvas, acrylic, wood, 3 panels 1m x 1.20m x 30cm
2015
Nueva colecciรณn de arte Marker, photocopies, gesso, wood, iron 2.45 m x 1.23 m x 75cm 2015
Original
Printed paper
1,000 copies
1m x 70cm
2015
BambaĂsmo Precolumbian ceramic reproductions, acrylic, iron 3m x 2.40m x 40 cm 2015
Artehall
Espaรงo Ocupado IV
Pavilhรฃo III
Project room 2015
Pencil, gesso on canvas
1.80m x 1,80m 2015
Oil, gesso on canvas 2.16m x 65cm
2015
Siesta project
Jornais
Siesta 1.38m
Saracura
Gesso on Rio de Janeiro newspapers
Agglomerated polyurethane 2016
2017
2016
60cm x 1.55m, 1.78m x 25cm, 1.38m x
Siesta project
GalerĂa Emma Thomas 2017
In some of these works I establish the possibility of engaging a relationship between the scale of the space and that of the body. The development of this exhibition was set from an idea of taking a pause to symbols of nationalistic narratives, intervening different surfaces that could be identified with a territory. Some pieces have gesso applied as forms that cover a color, a drawing, or an impression in newspapers. During the process of production, I worked in the exhibition space developing a temporary atelie. Through two weeks this space functioned as my studio over which I worked the pieces in a horizontal way over the floor. This helped me to think the pieces according to the space in which I was working generating a dynamic of interconnection between body, work and exhibition space.
Alfabeto 4
Gesso on linen, metal, cords
2m x 1.44m 2017
Alfabeto I
Pencil, gesso on linen
2m x 1.44m
2017
Alfabeto II
Pencil, gesso on linen 2m x 1.44m
2017
Alfabeto III
Pencil, gesso on linen. 2m x 1.44m
2017
Fardo
Gesso on fabric. 2.20m x 1.30m 2017
Bandeira horizontal
Oil, gesso on canvas panels 1.75m x 46cm 2017
Bandeira horizontal II Oil, gesso on canvas panels 1.75m x 46cm 2017
Derrota
Oil on canvas
65cm x 48cm 2017
Jornais
Gesso on newspapers
64cm x 55 cm e/p
2016
Corpo I
Oil on canvas and wood. 60cm x 40cm x 30 cm 2017
Corpo II
Oil on canvas and wood
1m x 60cm x 60cm
2017
Serie Sonho
2017
This series of paintings are related to a research about representation of territory and the association of painting with national symbols. The research was centered on painting as a contemporary medium that deals with notions of cartography and representational aspects of geometrical abstraction. The cut in the canvases reveal another side of the image that reflects on a double meaning of the image behind the image. The name of the series refers to the pause in rationality while dreaming, it also refers to a loss of rationality while awake, and in the current context, the association of nationalism to political extremes is represented as a form of irrationality while awake.
Sonho #1 Oil bar, pencil, gesso on canvas 1.50m x 2.20m
2017
Sonho #2 Oil bar, pencil, gesso on canvas 1.50m x 2.20m 2017
Sonho #3 Oil bar, pencil, gesso on canvas 1.50m x 2.20m
2017
Sonho #4 Oil bar, pencil, gesso on canvas 1.50m x 2.20m
2017
Fronteiras Efêmeras
2017
The work Fronteiras Efêmeras records an action that consists of the path of a local boat in a straight line through Boiçucanga Bay, while I perform the action of placing on the sea surface a series of geometric shapes cut into natural jute fabric drawing a virtual line between them. The forms disappearing into the sea after floating a few seconds. The impossibility of drawing a line in the chnaging surface of the water, becomes a starting point to generate a poetic narrative. The work takes inspiration from the work, "El cubo en cinta de la piramide" by Peruvian sculptor Emilio Rodriguez Larraín (1928 - 2015). Ephemeral Borders takes up the idea of a monumental and ephemeral work and explores its contradiction by portraying a line in the ocean in which the images of the action (photographs and video) ends up being the only visible renmant of the work.
Images: Leticia Lampert
Pavilhão / Pabellón
Galería Cecilia González Arte Contemporáneo 2018
In Pavilhão / Pabellón, Daniel Barclay addresses the question about the relations between cultural and political orders in contemporary life. To this end, the artist places two associations by means of his double title: On the one hand, via the Portuguese, the pavilion as architectural construction, that is to say, a building that integrates a larger ensemble, like the pavilion of a hospital, of a university city or of a Barracks (many of them public institutions). and taking Sao Paulo as an implicit geographical reference (being the city where the artist lives), the association with the biennial and the idea of a national representation is inevitable. On the other hand, via the Spanish and from Lima, the title also refers to a particular flag: the National Pavilion, which carries the Coat of Arms. However, such a flag can only be hoisted in public buildings (of the powers of the state, the armed forces, the national police, or public corporations), which makes it possible to establish a nexus between one association and another. Barclay's particular pavilion is composed of more than twenty panels made of expanded polystyrene and covered with epoxy resin, which present linear forms in different shades of red and white. The set creates an abstract landscape that has been installed in a floating way in the gallery. In its recourse to the forms of geometric abstraction, the artist invokes modern art and, in particular, neo-concrete art, emerged in Brazil at the end of the 50. This reference thus connects the artistic developments of modernism with the politicalinstitutional framework invoked by the title, which implicitly refers to the apparatus of state and the nation state and its symbology — all of them great constructions of the modern era —. Thus, Barclay insinuates the complex relationship between artistic languages, public institutions and national emblems: different ways of representing nations, but also of implementing their development: building, innovating, projecting. Barclay thus establishes an tacit counterpoint between the geometric organization of the pictorial space in modernism (especially Latin American), institutional architecture (where the Ciccillio Matarazzo pavillion of the architects Oscar Niemeyer and Hélio Uchôa, where the biennial of Sao Paulo is held, would be an implicit reference) and the bureaucratic structures of the modern state, suggesting some connections covered in the joint task (although not coordinated) for the construction of an identity. Nevertheless, modern art has also had resistance to the state and social order: it is worth remembering the old idea that abstraction is a response to the alienation of the subject, a product of the bureaucratic state, as well as a rupture against conventional and recognizable forms from figuration.
Barclay also points to taking distance from the political apparatus and from the modern city by means of the materials used, which are the same used in the manufacture of surfboards. In fact, his pieces evoke the geometric designs of the surfboards of the 70´s. Surf also offers a point of perspective from which the suspended elements are not only pieces of a puzzle that does not fit, but are the representation of a moving surface, about to transform itself. Seen like this, these "fragments of flag" not only break down and recompose a national symbol (the Peruvian flag), as questioning its meaning, but delineate agile paths along the surface that make up, through their relationships : proyect a surface to be sailed (coincidentally "national pavilion" is also the name of the stern flag of a boat indicating his nationality) — or surfed —, where the rigid structure of the flag is replaced by a rhythmic game of parts. In other words, the youth counterculture associated with surfing would also have temporary escape to that rigidity of the social and political apparatus that are represented by the flag. Daniel Barclay thus tracks the path that goes from the impulse of construction and ordering to its rupture and subversion, to reveal that within the same modern regulatory structures exist spaces of play and possibility ready to be exploited.
Max Hernández Calvo
Images: Juan Pablo Murrugarra
Pavilhรฃo / Pabellรณn Expanded polystyrene, acrylic, resin 8 pieces 1m x 70cm , 12 pieces 50cm x 40cm, 8 pieces 40cm x 30cm Total Dimension: 8m x 1.40m
2018
Deforma (series) 2018
Expanded polystyrene, acrylic, resin 1.30m x 1m x 10cm
Deforma (series)
Expanded polystyrene, acrylic, resin
1.34m x 80cm x 10cm, 1.30m x 75cm x 10cm, 90cm x 1m x 10cm, 1.34m x 80cm x 10cm, 1.30m x 1m x 10cm 2018
Caderno Jornal
55 SP 2018
When trying to alter in a certain way the value of the original object, what Caderno Jornal really does is to try to provoque, to put in check a whole logic of validation from the system that sustents these mercadologic codes, generating new symbols, and what intrigues us about the stablished order, implying a transformation of the nature of its own legitimacy. The economy of manufacture exposed in Caderno Jornal reveals the ‘negative’ and the ‘original’, and propose other lectures besides the distant matrix. The hipotesis is that we perceive an intention from part of the work of the artist of retaking the insertion, in these days, of a long and live reflection dedicated to the assimilation of visual culture of street news as a critical and aesthetical exercise in the field of art. Fragment of text, Marcio Harum
Caderno Jornal
Gesso on newspaper
30 pages
2018
Camelo
Oil and acrylic on canvas
Variable dimensions 2015
Corpo I, Corpo II
Oil on canvas and wood
Variable dimensions
2017
Sonho #I, Sonho #2 Oil bar, pencil and gesso on canvas. 1.50mx 2.22m e/p
Research for a logos of material space
Viafarini Art Residency 2018
The project is based on finding forms that represent a space while occupying it. In these times of fragmenting borders, we can question if it is possible to reconsider our approach to territory from a visual, artistic and critical point of view. In the research process, there were generated connections between cartography and the body exploring a natural geometry based on body experience. The relationship between space/body and canvas/space generated hybrid structures, part painting part object, understanding and developing new forms around the nature of space and territory.
Some works focus on questions around the construction of elements that measure space, using “painting� as an element similar to cartography that covers the surface that it intends to represent. My approach to painting as a medium that is both visual and material, explored the use of local materials (industrial and artistic) enabling me to explore different structures. Instead of projecting an image onto the canvas, I generated works that dialogue with space materiality and time. The resulted aesthetic structures build a material space that is present by means of image, scale, form and material.
Daniel Barclay
Images: Valerio Torrisi
Research for a logos of material space Acrylic and pencil on canvas. Spray, cords, glue, wall paint on canvas. Pencil and watercolor on paper. Fabric dye on newspaper. Variable dimensions 2018
Jornais
Acrylic on canvas, dyed Milan newspapers
2018
Research for a logos of material space I 1.97m x 1m 2018
Acrylic and pencil on canvas
Research for a logos of material space II 1.62m x 1.62m 2018
Acrylic and pencil on canvas
Drawings
Cords, brushes, pencil, watercolor on paper 2018
Loreto
Viafarini Art Residency 2018
The project was an approach to cartography from an historical point of view, using objects and signs of the present and everyday life and painting to refer to the past history of a geographic space. The space Piazzale Loreto is represented here in the context of historical events that happened there at the end of the second world war. One being the execution of 15 partisans by Mussolini and the other the display of the body of Mussolini and its collaborators hanged upside down from an Esso gas station. The installation relates to the space by means of different clues that present a constellation of elements and images. The papier mache made from newspapers from Milan, refers to a notion of an abstract territory. Arrows painted on a canvas refer to a Saint Sebastian silhouette portrayed in the monument to the martyrs near Piazzale Loreto and books bought from a street vendor near the รกrea describe abstract objects that are related to a space. The construction of a space through fragmented elements that refer to history invite the viewer to relate to a time-space representation. Daniel Barclay 2018
Images: Valerio Torrisi
Loreto Acrylic and marker on felt. Gesso and acrylic on canvas. Papier machĂŠ made with Milan newspapers. Books. Variable dimensions 2018
TROPICAL GARDENS
Felix Frachon Gallery 2019
Garden of Eden, Garden of the Hesperides or Babylon, gardens are millennial, often mythological constructions. They represent fictional spaces where the tension between nature and artifice appear, where the inside is protected from the outside, the fences creating a magical place of particular topography and temporality, singular yet not attached to any specific identity. When thinking about Latin America and Brazil in particular, one can’t help but think about lush vegetation, golden beaches and blue skies, just as the colors harbored by the Brazilian flag. Tropical Gardens approaches this outsider perspective through a series of artworks by Alice Quaresma, Mano Penalva and Daniel Barclay, questioning the idea of personal and collective identity and their representation. The materiality and spatiality of Daniel Barclays´s artworks relate to the complex imaginary linked to the national flags ‘concept. Using the canvas raw materiality, the artist defines territories and bodies through colors fields or seams while painted signs suggest new identities and alternatives to the burden of traditional nationalist narratives. Vibrant pink and orange paintings take over the exhibition space, while a red canvas defies the military interdiction to lay the flag on the ground. With Fardo, a hammock referring to the traditional Peruvian funeral cloth adds an allegoric layer to the impossible and immutable condition of the flag. In this context, the painted symbols used to guide the dead in its last journey are seen by the artist as a static image that only serves the living facing the fear of the unknown, or in other words what lies beyond the image and its representation. Mano Penalva´s artworks also carry their symbolic weight. With the series Acordes, the pre-established measures of industrial fabric contrasts with the folds created by the artist to suggest new identities and realities. Evoking the essential reproductivity of things, each fold carries an entire universe in itself while their support highlights the fragility and sharpness of human interactions. The translation of Acordes enhances the proposition as its multiple meanings can designate either an agreement or a musical chord as well as the imperative “wake up”. A close up slow motion video of the artist´s spelling “quem vai pagar essa conta” (who´s going to pay this bill) echoes in a somehow monstrous way with the imperativeness of the latest translation. Bringing relief to the tension established by the former artworks, a unified white flag made of adorned construction bags proposes a tabula rasa of identities, welcoming every human being, independently of their origin or beliefs.
Eventually, Alice Quaresma playfully searches for her past origins and current identity. Intervening on pictures from her childhood in Rio de Janeiro, the artist, now living in NYC, gathers her affective memories and enhances their subjective meaning through colorful geometric interventions, breaking the flatness and the objectivity of the picture. The apparent simplicity of the proposition implies nonetheless a complexity that the artist wishes to appear in its dependence with the viewer´s gaze. Her intuitive and generous approach favors a certain animality, a childlike point of view that brings us past our differences. Using matter and form to deconstruct and perform a slippage of the references that inspired them, searching new meanings and substituting places and geographies with colors and geometries, Alice Quaresma, Daniel Barclay and Mano Penalva may be seen as the creators of a garden. A garden where art and life gather in an heterotopy, a place inside and yet outside of the world, ruled by their desires and emergencies. Anchored in the here and now of nationalists and populists movements in Brazil and worldwide, the artists use their intuition and visual research as a thread to guide us toward a broader truth in an anthropophagic operation that merges their references. Despite their contemporary approach, Barclay, Penalva and Quaresma dialogue with the formal and political heritage of Brazilian neo-concrete artists such as Hélio Oiticica or Lygia Clark. Likewise, the artists reverberate the dark times Brazil went through during the 1964 dictatorship and is facing since the “white coup” of 2016 and the recent election of Bolsonaro, reminding us how fragile and mutable the concept of democracy can be. Tropical Gardens eventually evidences the contradiction of the idyllic exoticism linked, in the collective imaginary, to South American countries and the inherent violence of a post-colonial, pseudo democratic system, addressing by extension the European migration crisis and the rise of far right movements. This reminds us that the appeal of distant gardens should be taken with care, because as they say, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, only this is a lie. Julie Dumont / The Bridge Project
Research for a logos of material space II 1.62m x 1.62m 2018
Acrylic and pencil on canvas
Research for a logos of material space III 5.68m x 78cm 2018
Research for a logos of material space I 1.97m x 1m 2018
Cords, glue, spray, latex on canvas
Acrylic and pencil on canvas
Fardo
Gesso on fabric
2.20m x 1.30m 2017
Fake break - Falsa ruptura
NES art residency 2019
The project reflects on the contrast between the real and the virtual in a post – truth world. During a period at Nes art residency (the landscape of Skagastrond, Iceland) served as a context for working a series of paintings of juxtaposed images that are fragments and bits of the natural world and the virtual world. Nowadays, there is a clash of approaches between news articles based in believing and a scientific approach based in fact checking events. The project developed as a form of representation of reality in the context of fake news in which the dissemination of false information is so normalized, that is part of our daily life. The search for truth, which is a philosophical question is directed as a question to our interaction with the virtual world. The paintings reflect the contrast between the virtual and the natural world in form of fragments of shapes taken from images, memes, and news pictures that become abstract elements as well as the images taken from a series of drawings made of the natural landscape of Skagastrond.
Fake Break / Falsa Ruptura Acrylic on canvas, photocopies
Variable dimensions 2019
NUEVO LORETO
Vigil Gonzales GalerĂa 2020
Nuevo Loreto, by Daniel Barclay, is a kind of symbolic subversion. In the face of the violent cultural, discursive and iconographic appropriation developed by the political propaganda of our day, in this particular case, the one issued by the Alliance for Brazil - a party led by President Jair Bolsonaro -, the Peruvian artist questions the manipulation of a series of intangible elements that constitute the collective imaginary of a nation and the consequences that such political discourse has on cultural identity and territory. However, the work presented here is not limited to a complaint: Barclay enters this game of appropriations and builds a counter-language that aims to dismantle, neutralize and strip of (symbolic) warmongering propaganda strategies that coerce the current sociopolitical context. Thus, the work returns to the public space a whole system of symbols. In a fundamental essay, the German philosopher Boris Groys writes: "The question of identity is not a question for truth but for power: who has power over my identity, me or society?" (Art workers, between the utopia and the archive, Caja Negra 2016). Barclay extends this question about collective identity: who has the power over national, cultural identity? Society or Government? Within that framework, Nuevo Loreto juxtaposes two historical facts that operate, from the media, in similar ways. On the one hand, Barclay brings to the exhibition space the photograph of Benito Mussolini and five other members of the Italian Social Republic hung upside down in Piazzale de Loreto (Milan, Italy) on April 29, 1945. On the other, he reproduces a series of images of the campaign and ascent of Jair Bolsonaro, but he presents them inverted and intervened. In that double gesture, mainly, lies his insurrection. Barclay goes to the archive to presage a form of government and its future, or better yet, proposes to anticipate it so that society can reappropriate what belongs to it before recovery involves force. In a nutshell, with the brush and creative work, the artist, as if it were a guerrilla within the media field, is done with this language - the repetition of images until the accumulation - and reveals the manipulation strategies. In the second instance, the project highlights the physical dimension that involves violating the mythical and symbolic order. Without going any further, the novo ordem (new order) promoted by the Alliance for Brazil has triggered an environmental crisis well known to all. The deregulation of aboriginal land protection policies in the Amazon based on greater economic revenue is producing critical effects on this territory, a constitutive element -not just Brazil’s but of almost the entire South American region - of cultural identity. In this sense,
the work reflects on two other axes: how do we define a region whose constitutive elements, both physical and symbolic, are in an unprecedented process of destruction; and the equivalent importance of geography and culture (in excessively broad terms) to take dimension of a space.
In short, the message given to us by Nuevo Loreto oscillates between the complaint and the action, between memory and the archive, between forms and power. A series of relationships that aim to put sovereignty over identification mechanisms in the hands of society. Barclay's work responds here, perhaps, to the demands of twentieth-century political art (from an obviously contemporary perspective), a fact that speaks to us not of a stagnation of artistic production but, quite the opposite, of an involution of the Latin American political class.
Mathias Helbig
Images: MarĂa Luisa Malatesta
Loreto
Seis
Acrylic and marker on felt 1m x 1.38m 2018
Acrylic on felt 1.40m x 1.50m
2020
Nuevo Loreto
Acrylic, pencil on canvas 1.97m x 2.17m 2020
Serie Nuevo Loreto #1, #2
Acrylic, pencil on canvas 40cm x 60cm 2020
Ruina
Ceramic, dye, Milan newspapers
2.50m x 1.22m 2020
Daniel Barclay
Lima, Perú, 1972
Lives and Works in São Paulo Collective Shows 07/04/99- “El Comic en el Arte Moderno” Galería 2V “S”. Lima 1999- Exhibición de Estandartes, La Paz “Capital de la Cultura Iberoamericana”, La Paz 14/11/99- “El Ultimo Lustro” Centro Cultural de la Municipalidad de Miraflores, Sala Luis Miro Quesada Garland. Lima 02/11/99- I Muestra Internacional de Minigrabado Vitoria 2000, Museo de Arte do Espirito Santo. Spirito Santo 21/09/00- Exposicion bi-personal “Accidente de Transito” Daniel Barclay – Sebastian Frank, Universidad del Pacifico. Lima 09/08/01- “NO(s)OTROS, Colectivo “Otrosomos” (cur María Burela) Centro Cultural de España Lima 29/01/02- “Juegos No Cuerdos” Colectivo “Otrosomos”, (cur María Burela) La Galeria. Lima 2003,Noviembre- “Entre Eros y Tanatos” Colectivo Otrosomos, (cur María Burela)Centro Cultural de España. Lima 2003, Diciembre- “Post-postal” Euroart Studios, Londres 2004, Setiembre- MA show. Central Saint Martins. Londres. 29/03/05- location/locality, the self through location. Diorama Arts Center. Londres. 06/04/05- What Happens When Everything Is Reduced To Ones And Zeros?, Pearlfisher Gallery, Londres. 16/06/05 – Performance “Banana Republic”, festival “The Free Will”, www.derfreie-wille.de, Berlin. 09/08/06 – “Reencuentro 1” Galería de la Escuela de Arte Corriente Alterna. Lima 03/09/09 – “Medalla de Oro” Escuela de Artes Visuales Corriente Alterna. Lima 15/10/2011 “Um punto nao revelado numa ilustración botánica” Hermes Artes Visuais. Sao Paulo
10/11/2012 “Sábado” presentación de proyecto montanha. Casa Contemporánea. Sao Paulo 15/04/2016 “Think Big”, Chisthopher Phaschall, Bogotá 24/03/2017 “A soma dos quadrados dos catetos é igual ao quadrado da hipotenusa” (cur Omar Porto) SARACURA; Rio de janeiro 01/03/2018 “O Maravilhamento Das Coisas” (cur Julie Dumont) Galería Sancovsky. Sao Paulo 13/10/2018 VIR Open Studio Viafarini art residency. Milano 14/11/2018 VIR Open Studio Viafarini art residency. Milano 21/06/2019 “Tropical Gardens” (cur Julie Dumont) Felix Frachon Gallery. Brussels
Solo Shows 27/08/01- “Identidad y Consumo” Corriente Alterna. Lima 12/05/05 – “Chamán Urbano” Corriente Alterna. Lima 21/06/06 – “subcutáneo”, La Galería. Lima 20/06/07 – “Convento”, La Galería. Lima 17/04/2010. “Tu morro w” , espacioTUMAY. Lima. 23/09/2010 “Trópicos Sólidos/Materia Oscura” proyectos en residencia FAAP, Casa Contemporánea. Sao Paulo 11/11/2010 “Hot Air”, Selected Works 2008 – 2010. Gorup Gallery. Torino 10/09/2011 “aire caliente”, espacio la ex culpable. Lima 17/12/2011 “novos trópicos”, Hermes Artes Visuais. Sao Paulo 10/08/2012 “no vacancia/espacio ocupado”, IK Project. Sao Paulo 11/10/2014 “Estratificaciones Culturales”, Galería Revolver-Cajamarca. Lima (cur Paula Borgui) 21/05/2015 “Bambaísmo”, Sala Luis Miroquesada Garland. Lima (Cur Marcio Harum) 29/10/2015 “Bambaísmo”, Galeria Christopher Phaschall. Bogotá 18/07/2017 “Siesta”, Galería Emma Thomas, São Paulo
16/04/2018 Pavilhao/Pabellón, Galería Cecilia Gonzalez Arte Contemporáneo, Lima (texto Max Hernández) 21/ 07/2018 Caderno Jornal, 55SP, São Paulo 14/01/2020 Nuevo Loreto , Vigil Gonzales Galería, Lima
Residencies 01/08/10-30/09/10 FAAP - Sao Paulo 19/07/11-31/07/11 Curatoria Forense - Boiçucanga 29/09/2011-20/12/11 Hermes Artes Visuais– Sao Paulo 05/05/2012 – 30/10/2012 Hermes Artes Visuais– Sao Paulo 01/09/2015 – 30/10/2015 Barcú – Bogotá 08/10/2017 – 29/10/2017 Kaaysaartresidency - Boiçucanga 01/09/2018 – 16/11/2018 Viafarini Art Residency – Milan 01/10/2019 – 30/10/2019 NES Art Residency - Skagastrond
Studies MA Fine Arts. Central Saint Martins. University of the Arts. 2003-2004. Londres Tesis “Chaman Urbano” “Corriente Alterna” 2002-2003. Lima Carrera de Bellas Artes, “Corriente Alterna” 1994-1999. Lima
Prizes Primer Premio del IX Salón Nacional de Pintura. ICPNA 2001. Lima - Perú Finalista del quinto Concurso Fundación Telefónica. 2001. Lima - Perú Medalla de Oro, Corriente Alterna 1999. Lima- Perú