ALBERTO BARAYA. Automaquias and other fables

The Fernando Pradilla gallery presents the third solo exhibition of the artist Alberto Baraya (Bogotá, 1968); titled Automachies and Other Fables: Madrid Expedition, which gathers about thirty recent works specifically produced for this project.

The exhibition is made up of works that belong to the series Self-Fables, offering a reflection on the form of “visual essay” about our contemporary society. It is an iconographic dissertation which borrows from the literary structure of the fable. On this occasion, Baraya resorts to a discourse built around three elements: the landscape as stage of events, animals (both nativa and exotic) as characters traversing, inhabiting and causing an impact upon that geography, and automobiles as artificial symbols of the vagaries and follies of humanity.

“The ownership the rearing-up of exotic or powerful animals has worked since Antiquity as a sign attached to the glorification of power. In a similar manner, luxury and the technological power of cars takes up, increasingly, the same functions that were formerly exercised by the panoply of chariots and horses. In the series of images that I am presenting here I reflect about the behaviour of various symbols of power such as animals and cars.” A.B.

Goya’s Tauromachy inspires the Automachies series. In the second half of the 19th century the Enlightened intelligentsia would initiate the debate on the legitimacy of the fiesta. Francisco de Goya, always privy to the social and political feelings of the age, echoing the public sentiment in this series of engravings, the last he produced, which outlines a history of bullfighting in Spain from Antiquity, going through the Muslim period, past the Christian Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Alberto Baraya picks up as a point of reference some of Goya’s images and substitutes the figure of the bull with a series of Pegaso car models manufactured in the late 50’s by the estate-owned, Barcelona-based company ENASA. The production of these automobiles became a strategy devised by the Francoist regime to project a modern and progressive image on the international stage, that of a country with an advanced technology industry. Those luxury cars, of which only eighty were produced, became the true status symbol of their owners and, to this day, they remain exclusive collector pieces.

The confluence of both these apparently unrelated figures, the bull and the car, produces a series of drawings and paintings where Baraya, once again, questions the images that erect themselves as symbols of power and social status. “The series Automachies collects works inspired by the Tauromachy and other works of Goya where each individual original engraving is assaulted by the presence of those Pegaso automobiles. The exclusive models of this motor brand intervene in the lessons of tauromachy collected by Goya, staging a kind of symbolic “competition.” The work of Goya, which was instrumental to the construction of a romantic idea of Spain in the works of French and English writers, appears here as a building block of that other enterprise in symbolic propaganda which was post-war Spain, with structures that still remain in the collective imaginary.” A.B.

The work of Alberto Baraya entails a profound reflection, charged with irony, concerning the tools of scientific knowledge and the structures of legitimation of culture such as museums. His work unfolds in open projects which develop through the years in the manner of scientific expeditions. Baraya has constructed a kind of alter-ego, an explorer who travels in quest for “exotic specimens” like the great explorers did in the 18th and 19th century, basing his “pseudo-scientific” method in that which was employed by José Celestino Mutis’s Royal Botanic Expedition in the Kingdom of New Granada.

It is from expeditions such as the ones led by figures like Mutis, Humboldt, and others great explorers that the European Cabinet of Curiosity were created, featuring objects, plants and animals from newly discovered or colonized territories. These cabinets, templates for the modern museum, were employed in the study, analysis and diffusion of scientific knowledge.

Of Spanish ascendancy and raised in America, Baraya has travelled through both territories, which confers him a critical vision in both directions. One of the best known series is the 2002 Herbarium of Artificial Plants, created from a strambotic collection of pseudo botanic plates that are based on the scientific method of observation, analysis and cataloguing of taxa, but uses instead plastic and cloth specimens “made in China.”

The exhibition which we now presenting in the Fernando Pradilla Gallery bears the subtitle Madrid Expedition, being a result of the long relationship between Alberto Baraya and our city. In 1998 he became one of the few young artists selected to participate in the program Circuitos de la Sala de Arte Joven which came about from his first encounter with the works of Goya in the shape of a series of photographic forays into the Prado Museum. Baraya produced for said exhibition an analogic, in situ photomontage, blending the works of the great masters and quotidian scenes from our city life. In this new return to Madrid, Baraya picks up on the humour of Goya’s long tradition, through the different attempts at modernizing autarchies in the 20th century.

Alberto Baraya remains one of the most respected Colombian artists in the current contemporary art scene at an international level. He has represented his country in the Sao Paulo Biennale, the Venice Biennale, and he is participating at the moment in the Shanghai Biennale, invited by Andrés Jaque. He holds a BA in Fine Arts from the Universidad Nacional of Colombia, and a PhD in Aesthetics and Art Theory from the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid. His works are included in the collections of the Banco de la República and Mambo in Bogotá, the Bronx Museum of the Arts in NYC, the Jorge Pérez