Rodrigo Barrales

Brasil

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Rodrigo Barrales in born in São Paulo, Brazil, is draftsman, painter, sculptor, printmaker and restorer, abandoned the architecture course due to the growing interest in the plastic arts. In 1997, he began to immerse himself in the arts and set up his atelier near Congonhas airport, São Paulo - Brazil, and took several courses, some taught by the artist Paulo Monteiro. At the same time, he decided to found the intervention group Quatro de Arte, with his colleagues from the course, and mobilized several exhibitions. In 2019, he moves to Granada, Spain, at which time he reconnects with his Spanish roots, which is naturally reflected in his new work. Currently lives in São Paulo.

Anyone who knows the entire artistic career of Rodrigo Barrales notices the transformations in his technique and concept of art, which were previously paintings based on cubist and surrealist inspirations, Barrales decides to take a more contemporary turn in his works, go beyond his own concepts and pass through various techniques and supports that seek to show social experiences, his observations always notice the human figure, most often expressed without a face or unfinished body.

His works, regardless of technique or medium, undergo communication, the artist always starts his series in drawings and then migrates to the other techniques in which he works, exercising a path without knowing where the explored concept begins and ends. In painting, drawing and in his watercolors, Barrales seeks spontaneity in the natural way of creation, he never knows how the works will end, they are lost lines, stains, simplified drawings, often with scarce realism. Whoever observes his works, without a doubt, notices the aesthetic communication between them.

Exhibition
"Retratos familiares"
2021, Oct - Lisbon.

It can be said that drawing on paper represents the main vehicle of Rodrigo Barrales' artistic conception. Therefore, in the creative process, such a vehicle is used as a bridge to all other techniques that can be developed. It can be observed that all his works are figurative, which reveal affective or temporal passages of some personal or non-personal moment. Through the works, he works with complex structures of the human musculature, trying to summarize them in a few lines, without many details, giving volume and expression, but without filling them. Furthermore, it develops a reflection on the relationships between drawing and space, which are confused, resulting in a conflict over the focus and distance between them.

Another characteristic of his works is the presence of the observer and the proposed stimulus, which provokes the look, reflection, the experimentation of feelings or situations. In contact with the works, each subject will have an experience that successively differs from the others. Each observer apprehends, feels and relates based on their own identification, as the work does not have a ready-made form, but only a sketch, a silhouette. Note that the use of strokes, as well as the use of the technical pen, is a strong presence in the creative concept. These elements are present since childhood, refer to family moments and bring life to the past. Therefore, using them, he articulates past and present life, childhood and adulthood, as well as his academic initiation.

In this series of drawings made with Pen Technique Nanquim, he portrays moments of family encounters that express affection, experiences, personal narratives, or not, which are revealed by traits that provoke hugs, kisses, among other forms of demonstration of affection and contemplation. These, by the way, are the main acts that we can appreciate there. The drawings he develops range from an initial study of figures, starting from the spontaneity of lines that go beyond the limits of the paper. In a way, this series arises from the set of drawings, consequently as a technical and conceptual development and not as a figure. Thus, in the Family Portraits series, the fabrication study presented here begins.

They are family portraits that tend to rescue old photos stored in drawers and trunks. They are memories long forgotten, the result of the ephemeral, rapid and globalized flux of contemporary life, but which still reside in our imagination. In the Family Portraits series (Variation 2021), the folded sheets interconnected by sewing lines in the color of the pen, refer to a dismantling of shape and at the same time leads the viewer to go through different angles of vision before the work, causing a sense of deconstruction and a discovery of new designs, shapes and shadows within the same work.