The Invention of Distances

Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência
da Universidade de Lisboa
June 6 | July 16 2023

The interior of the painting

The exhibition The Invention of Distances, by César Barrio, consists of two large-format paintings, three sculptures, and three videos. His work focuses on the blurring of the boundaries between space, whether cosmic or microscopic, and this pictorial research is materialized in his works. César Barrio is a painter of painting, sculpture, and video, where color overflows and fills our soul; like Cézanne, “color is the meeting point between our brain and the universe.” His work’s impulsiveness and conceptual homogeneity are fascinating in the compulsive search to reach the interior of the painting.

The Invention of Distances results from understanding painting, painting as constant research. As Gaston Bachelard tells us, “a subject will never seem sufficiently elaborated because you have never finished dreaming it.” In this sense, it is impossible not to be aware of the gaze, of the objective, which is entirely mental and cultural. The sensible works with the intelligible and from the relationship between the painter and the painting, “all art is l’art pour l’art only insofar as the aesthetic form reveals forbidden and repressed dimensions of reality: aspects of emancipation”. When we speak of the total work, the commitment disappears; often it is the commitment to ourselves, here to art.

Quoting the artist, “it is curious to discover that the fact of looking is the painter’s tool, his obesity throughout the history of painting and the search for the intangible, what is not seen, which is a contradiction, hence the invention of distances that relates to natural history, geology, science. In painting, I always try to make the difference between exterior and interior space disappear”. César Barrio withdraws to create his artistic works. Foucault tells us: “Isn’t the dancer’s body a body expanded according to a space that is both interior and exterior at the same time? This is what César Barrio seeks in his painting. Following Foucault’s thought, “The resemblance then becomes the combat of one form against another – or rather, of the same form separated from itself by the weight of matter or the distance of places.”

Continuing to quote César Barrio, he wrote during his first artistic residency in Lisbon in 2011:

“The more you descend into the interior of matter, increasing the scale of vision, as if opening a tunnel or entering a cave, the images that remain in your hands keep that formal resemblance to the photos sent to us by satellites.
The more weight or density you introduce to the object, the more lightness you produce in it.

Far and near are confused when self-conscious matter pours out its brightness.”

 
Sofia Marçal. Curator

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