How things have changed…

How things have changed…

Is the third individual exhibition of the American artist Robert Barry at Parra & Romero. The show combines several classic works -from 1969, 1970 and 1971- with recent paintings that Barry has created specifically for this occasion.

Throughout his long career, Robert Barry has worked on immaterial or ephemeral issues and their possibilities of perception, such as silence, emptiness, invisibility, language, thought or even electromagnetic waves. To put the accent on what has no physicality, and make it his work of art, the artist uses material elements that function as delimiters. Thus, the absence of a layer of paint is what makes visible the outline of the letters in his paintings – letters of words that are pure suggestions, thus establishing an intuitive and subjective relationship with the spectator. The pictorial surface therefore becomes a space where the figure and the background are exchanged in their usual addition-subtraction attributes, revealing the word where matter is absent and, at the same time, giving the space between words a prominent role in the composition. The painting serves to point at the spaces where there is no painting: the letters; the paintings serve to highlight the empty space that exists between them: the white wall, the volume of the exhibition space and even the viewer’s mental space.

The question of invisibility, and of time and space as necessary conditions to perceive, is present in those paintings that at first glance look like monochromes, but where words are revealed as the viewer moves around the artwork. Another version of that same idea is that presented by the paintings in which the words seem to melt into their red background.

The vinyl works, Private Thoughts… (1969) and Art Work (1970), are classic pieces that represent a transitional stage in the work of Robert Barry, between his concern for the immateriality in the 60’s and his fundamental use of language during the 70s. Art Work is a tautology on the wall: a work of art that consists of a possible definition of what a work of art is. On the other hand, Private Thoughts… is a series of thoughts that the artist communicates to the public telepathically: the text on vinyl is only testimonial. It Is also an historical piece because it was going to be exhibited at the X São Paulo Biennial, though it finally was not showed beacuse the artists from the USA decided to join the boycott to protest against the repression by the Brazilian dictatorship.

Robert Barry (New York, 1936) graduated from Hunter College in New York, where he also taught between 1964 and 1979. Since his first exhibition in 1964, Barry’s work has been exhibited in museums in the United States and throughout the world. His work is part of the permanent collections of: MoMA, New York; Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Chicago Art Institute, Chicago; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among others.