RELIEFS
First news or verification: unbearable scenery that derives from petrol or gas-oil driven vehicles. There is no escape from the logic of the computer. It is the same logic that governs the delirium of productivity or the jungle tam-tam of the market economy. Aerodynamic penetration coefficient, wedge line, lullaby with a death inside, whiplash for the sobbing child, mental and physical hardship of the majorities, glass and steel, deep-frozen food, crushing rationality, pollution, self-flagellation, not even Baudelaire, escapism, don’t know/no answer, apotheosis of the junkie.
It is not an anecdote but a revealing circumstance that Manuel Barreiro is, in addition to being a ceramist, a biologist. Let us destroy the cliché by force of repetition: life has its origin in the sacred murkiness of slime. Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return. Mud of the beginning and the end, nothing to do with the phallocracy of the skyscraper, with the machismo of speculation, with the desperate erection that precedes impotence.
That is why it is such a pleasure to see the humble choice of material when, from the complexity of scientific knowledge, Manuel Barreiro decides to make the leap to the no-man’s land in which creative activity unfolds.
Ceramic support, expressive vehicle and original chime that brings us back to the encounter and reflection on the fleetingness of history or the superb transience of architectures inhabited by time and, consequently, wounded beforehand by the distant glow of the mortal.
Man and life as a dialectic without winners or losers. Perhaps some oriental resonance, a vague pharaonic iconography, immense and rational staircases that ascend to an impossible, priestly world, inhabited by dark secrets, while the clay reveals the traces of the past, the fallacy inherent in all forms of power and refers us, from the warm geometries of its contours, to the possibility of the senses as sources of pleasure and liberation.
Manuel Barreiro is committed to expressive rigour and to the dignification of an art, that of ceramics, which stems from man’s most ancient experience.
I believe that, in this respect, praise will come effortlessly to the viewer’s conscience.
Francisco López Barrios, April 1989, cultural director of El Independiente, prologue to the exhibition at the Aldaba Gallery, Madrid.
RELIEFS
First news or verification: unbearable scenery that derives from petrol or gas-oil driven vehicles. There is no escape from the logic of the computer. It is the same logic that governs the delirium of productivity or the jungle tam-tam of the market economy. Aerodynamic penetration coefficient, wedge line, lullaby with a death inside, whiplash for the sobbing child, mental and physical hardship of the majorities, glass and steel, deep-frozen food, crushing rationality, pollution, self-flagellation, not even Baudelaire, escapism, don’t know/no answer, apotheosis of the junkie.
It is not an anecdote but a revealing circumstance that Manuel Barreiro is, in addition to being a ceramist, a biologist. Let us destroy the cliché by force of repetition: life has its origin in the sacred murkiness of slime. Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return. Mud of the beginning and the end, nothing to do with the phallocracy of the skyscraper, with the machismo of speculation, with the desperate erection that precedes impotence.
That is why it is such a pleasure to see the humble choice of material when, from the complexity of scientific knowledge, Manuel Barreiro decides to make the leap to the no-man’s land in which creative activity unfolds.
Ceramic support, expressive vehicle and original chime that brings us back to the encounter and reflection on the fleetingness of history or the superb transience of architectures inhabited by time and, consequently, wounded beforehand by the distant glow of the mortal.
Man and life as a dialectic without winners or losers. Perhaps some oriental resonance, a vague pharaonic iconography, immense and rational staircases that ascend to an impossible, priestly world, inhabited by dark secrets, while the clay reveals the traces of the past, the fallacy inherent in all forms of power and refers us, from the warm geometries of its contours, to the possibility of the senses as sources of pleasure and liberation.
Manuel Barreiro is committed to expressive rigour and to the dignification of an art, that of ceramics, which stems from man’s most ancient experience.
I believe that, in this respect, praise will come effortlessly to the viewer’s conscience.
Francisco López Barrios, April 1989, National Spanish TV editor, prologue to the exhibition at the Aldaba Gallery, Madrid.