Art Exhibition text for La Pierde Almas - Decade 1994-2004,
Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Sonoma, California.
By John Dickie

Cantinas, though filled with music and laughter, are not to be confused with bars. They are actually confessionals for the damned, and regular visitations provide a revelatory glimpse into the complex machinations of the Mexican mind.

Jonathan Barbieri is evidently a 'regular'. After so many years living in Oaxaca, eagerly familiarizing himself with the countless drinking holes in and around the city, he has proven himself so. His cantina series, La Pierde Almas, is not the product of a foreign artist conducting a field study in an exotic location. Rather, it is the work of a man translating a sub-world that has absorbed him as its own, evidenced in the way cantineros warmly receive him in half a dozen establishments around the city of Oaxaca.

In Oaxaca, the emotional landscape suffers extremes of weather. A mountain community may appear peaceful and pastoral - like it does in so much of the art produced by both locals and foreigners in Oaxaca - but one day it might erupt into violence. Case in point: the massacre at Agua Fria in May 2002, when 26 sawmill workers died in an alleged land dispute. Oaxacans are not prone to showing emotion or expressing self-doubt, and the hatch to their reservoir of pent-up grief generally stays shut, locked. But it is liable to burst open. Put another way, depression isn't common, but there is a high rate of suicide. Alcohol and the cantina provide a purgatorial refuge between the colliding spheres of coping with daily life, and not coping. In Barbieri's words: "The toll-booth between human beings and hell".

In La Pierde Almas, actually the name of a fictitious cantina created by the artist, we clearly observe the conjunction of irreverence and awe, wildly appropriate to Mexico, which Barbieri formulates at the easel. These are scenes imbued with the smouldering psychological sub-climate of southern Mexico, teeming with what Malcolm Lowry called "the poltergeists of the ether".

In every cantina, a stage-play about exorcism and the possibility of Atonement unfolds. As if spellbound by mezcal, a soul's suppressed black matter begins floating to the surface of its consciousness, like a song snaking out of the abominable figure in "The Singer". Once expunged into the public miasma of the cantina, it will be collectively regretted, lamented, scolded, and ultimately - this being Mexico -, toasted to and joked about. In identifying the cantina as a powerful lens into the human condition, Barbieri narrates his commentary on the world with a purposefulness that is too often lacking in modern art.

In his seminal book about the Oaxacan arts, Robert Valerio asks the rhetorical question: "Why has no local artist ever painted the interior of a public bus?" Valerio refered to the lack of realist work addressing basic human circumstance in Oaxaca, the poorest state in Mexico, and berated the local fixation with ersatz rural impressionism. But the question has resonance in the broader context of modern art and its role in today's world.

Given even a modicum of conviction, Art can and should exert its influence in these difficult times; not bow to the demands of the market, but trumpet its potential transcendental power. Barbieri went beyond the public bus and painted the interior of a cantina, furnace of human interaction, because he believes in the transformational power of Art.

- Oaxaca, October 2004

For all malaise, drink mescal
For all that’s good, you also should
When you haven’t a chance,
Take a litre-and-a-half.

- Oaxacan folk wisdom

Art Exhibition text for La Pierde Almas - Decade 1994-2004,
Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Sonoma, California.
By Jonathan Barbieri

The cantina is a stage upon which the Profane Comedy plays itself out in a continuous loop. Its overwhelming attraction for me as a painter is that within its walls, and through the powerful lens provided by the various spirits that one consumes there, the daily struggles of human existence are condensed and brought into sharp focus. In its way, the cantina is like a rabbit hole into which one quite often literally stumbles to plumb the passions, tragedies, the revelry and the simple acts of kindness that make up life’s daily passage.

I began this series in July of the year 2000 when I set out to produce a body of in situ studies that could later be transposed onto large canvasses. Although, for the next two years I continued haunt the cantinas (ostensibly for the purposes of research), I soon abandoned the idea of expanding the studies into full-blown paintings. Drawing and painting, though they do have much in common, are two separate and discreet disciplines; each with its own debt to history, each unfolding in its own way, towards its own peculiar objectives. If it had truly been my goal to reel off a series of snapshot sketches for later development back in the studio, I would have been better off having packed a camera rather than my bundle of rags and pencils.

The heightened awareness induced by the uniqueness of a strange place usually sends the experience of working on site over the edge, into the transcendent realm of the exultant. The smoke-filled chambers of the cantina are no exception and indeed have their own special appeal.

To be cloistered securely within those old, meter-thick walls enamelled in some dyspeptic shade of green and dazzlingly tattooed, by generations of flies, into a copracosmic chart of the firmament; to dive through that soupy effluvium composed of tobacco smoke and a load of bus fumes forcing their way in from the insanely narrow street beyond the swinging doors; to soak in the vapor of an ocean of spilled booze mixed inseparably with the bouquet of blood sausage and pork maw deep-fried in chile and onions, combined with the reek of industrial strength floor cleaner, and cockroach spray – this, along with about a half liter of quality mezcal, is chemotherapy to cure just about any soul; the recommended minimum daily requirement of toxic waist for a long and hearty life in an hopelessly tainted world. Who could possibly resist killing an afternoon in a cantina? No wonder you never have to walk more than a few blocks to find one – whether in the Barrio de Xochimilco or within the colonial grid of adobe buildings that make up the Centro Historico or in the cobblestone streets of Jalatlaco. Each new darkened doorway, belching its umberness out to the sunny street, is more seductive than the last.

There are few moments that I can think of that are more sublime than sitting alone at a table in some darkened nook, sketching and absorbing the particulars of the moment’s theatre passing before me. But, while it was imperative that the initial work took place there, what I actually witnessed and what I put down were two very different things. The best drawings are based not upon what one sees, but upon what the pencil, brush or pallet knife, acting autonomously, chooses to imply. The depths of verisimilitude that the act of drawing is capable of sounding reach far beyond the simple dogma of fact. Art feeds on life, but should never imitate it.

- Oaxaca, September 2004

Hell is Other People
Impressions of the Paintings of Jonathan Barbieri
By Guillermo Fadanelli, Crónica Dominical, Sunday, February 10, 2002, Mexico City
Translated by Frank Barbers

Before we even begin, it seems proper to ask ourselves if writing about painting can have any real meaning at all. What value can there be in adding commentary to a work of art that, like everything else in life, should be able to stand on its own? The truth is, not much. Writing does not always encounter the right pathways for establishing relations with painting. If we renounce being lyrical, our words probably will end up sounding pedantic. If we renounce being critical, our opinions will fade like so many romantic brushstrokes. There is nothing left but to attempt to be true to our impressions. It is my good fortune that the work of Jonathan Barbieri does not leave much room for idle rhetoric. We are not being confronted by an enigma that needs to be deciphered. The paintings do not in any way present themselves as conceptual puzzles. Rather they are abrupt realities. Only after the first impression can the arguments commence.

It is not a simple matter transcribing the effect of a painting that moves you. An ashtray on the table at which two men unhurriedly consume the hours before dawn; the black hair of a woman listening to the conversation of her bizarre companion; the back of an ochre colored chair occupied by a shattered human body. It is, of course, possible to make an impassive description of each one of the elements that make up a painting. But once the inventory has been concluded, we realize that we have nothing in hand save the feeling of some strange loneliness.

No description, however detailed, would be capable of sounding the depths of emotion roused by a direct, all-seeing stare. The image stays with us from the very first, but never finds any real comfort in our memory. When we look at this work we are not being confronted by a story that is unknown to us. Nor are we faced with personalities that are alien. We know at least something about this absolute orphanry that seems incurable even with companionship. To those of us who have consumed the hours till daybreak at a table in a cantina conversing with a stranger, it all seems just like home. A home full of nocturnal spectres that possess the gravity of the living. A home full of real beings that possess the non-gravity of shades. Even if we have never visited this subterranean world that spawns on the margins of life’s routines, we cannot feel out of place: here, death attracts us because she lives among us; she is the place from which we come and we need to know her before returning to her breast.

This gathering of dark silhouettes is so familiar it seems to have emanated from the moment when everybody has already been judged and every sentence has been assimilated. It is enough to say that the language that Barbieri uses is rooted in experience, in an encounter with everything that is human. His images are not metaphors for an art made up of insinuations. These are the most violent brushstrokes possible with which to invoke the compassion of the spirit. The glasses within which the alcohol waits to be drunk. The black, sunken eyes of men who but stare straight ahead. Bodies without sex. Blood that flows without end. How are we supposed to tolerate the laughter of this man that bleeds along the contours of his neck? Up to what point is it possible to support the nocturnal visitation of a bird? It is not an exaggeration to say that this work is highly disconcerting. I felt it from the first time that Barbieri showed me his paintings. It is not a matter of studying them, rather, it’s a matter of having to come to terms with them.

In the end, as Nietzche believed, life is short on arguments. Explanations always come in the wake of the act. They are afterthoughts. It would be of little use to attempt to decipher the order or meaning of the symbols that tell the story in each painting: a two-headed serpent, or the shadow of a missile, or a red hoop suspended in another dimension within the canvas. I could risk an interpretation, even though, without doubt, I would be mistaken. But, of one thing I am sure: the consequence of the absence of any one of these symbols would be the nullification of the painting’s universe, the disappearance of all meaning. Without that incubus suspended like a pendulum over the table, the painting (Arm Wrestlers) would fall apart. If Barbieri’s paintings have the power to disturb us, it is because upon their surfaces there is absolutely nothing that is superfluous. As when Death chooses her victims with absolute precision, every object occupies its exact place within the painting.

Everything seems to happen around the table. Or, rather, everything appears to have already happened. In spite of the existence of a rumour of conversation, or of discreet laughter, it is the silence that dominates the scene. These are paintings without sound. Even the faces seem to be accustomed to themselves; none of that eloquent dementia that invades the countenances of classic expressionism. Nor do I believe that there is a sense of tragedy hidden in the work’s subtext. Rather, I see desolation, resignation, exile. How many writers would not love to be able to paint one of these paintings in order to save themselves those long hours of stringing together ambiguous, troublesome words.

I believe that no sensitive person has the right to normalcy. Neither do I believe that a painting like the ones described in these pages can ever be the object of disinterest. It would be absurd to try to remain stoic before the paintings of Goya or Otto Dix. The body of a whore drawn by Rouault imposes itself upon our vision because, in so few brushstrokes, all of her humanity is placed before us, uncovered. “All life is a story about sinking,” thought Coiran. Each painting by Barbieri is a story about madness, about finality and death, about decline and decay. It isn’t surprising that the colors he uses give us the impression of having been conceived by the light of a lamp barely sufficient to distinguish the silhouette of one from the other. They are colors that have much in common with that pallid light of the first hours of the day when the sun disturbs us with its scandalous brilliance, when the bottle is drained and there is only blood on the floor.

THE RECOVERED SOUL
- the work of Jonathan Barbieri
Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros
Amigos de Bellas Artes, Mexico D.F., January, 2002.

I remember an old print that made a big impact on me. It’s by Jose Guadelupe Posada. In it we see two scruffily dressed characters standing outside a cantina. They both hold jars of pulque and sing a toast as they convene, their bodies already ravaged by alcohol.

I remember this image in particular because it contained a curious contradiction: the drinkers were outside the door of the tavern, on the street. They were not inside, where they would probably have carried out the same actions illustrated in the print. There was something strange in that. Perhaps this is why the scene comes back to me years later; perhaps because deep down I wished that the characters were inside the cantina, or that perhaps I could accompany them, even standing up and on the pavement…

I think the pictorial work of Jonathan Barbieri touches tangentially on that old scene in the print from the 19th century to which I refer, and not just for its thematic qualities. The difference lies in the fact that Barbieri, by placing us as spectators in front of those inside the cantina ‘La Pierde Almas’, turns us into involuntary patrons and therefore accomplices of what happens there.
Thus, denuded of their souls, he introduces us to the protagonists and places them before our eyes in a way that they themselves have never seen each other. Perhaps they are not aware of it, but they are the denizens of a world that they believed to be private and intimate. But now, maybe even in spite of them, we can hold them in our hands just as on other evenings that old image of two men - toasting on a public thoroughfare, just outside a cantina – held us.

I remember when two of Jonathan Barbieri’s paintings were exhibited in the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca. His presence their broke away from much of what was being shown on that occasion. The compositional structure of the two canvasses was completely orthodox and reminded me of paintings from the Flemish school of the 17th century. Let us say that these works are ‘traditional’ in appearance but within that framework some highly topical themes are developed, such as in the one where seven characters are drinking around a table.

In a scene taking place in a bar, we see a man with a bullet-hole in his temple, another with an open gash in his neck, another one whose eyes have been censored to preserve his identity and others with the sunken eyes that often characterise corpses. Above them, perhaps in homage to Bosch, a dragonfly or demon or bleeding man is hovering near the blades of a ceiling-fan. At the same time, he is falling towards the figures at the table.

As though it were a continuation of this piece, there was another work in which you could see a table strewn with human bones, a bottle, a shoe, shot glasses, cigarette butts; no one was seated at the table. Did they all leave? No, rather they’ve returned to the table in death. The piece filled me with great despair that was quickly mitigated* when I saw photos of some of Barbieri’s previous work. They were pieces from the first half of the 1990s in which the characters were carrying out the most eccentric actions imaginable.

In that series the characters were interacting in closed spaces scarcely opened up by a few windows where, in some cases, you could see fragmented body parts. Their postures, the environments within which they had been set and the corporality that denoted individuals of a more European or Anglo-Saxon background readdressed and transmuted some of the more established aesthetic patterns of north American art. But here they are clearly in a position of open spiritual and psychic disadvantage before the eyes of the spectator.

The stories and situations are absurdly suggestive. Two men roar with laughter at a third who is standing before a microphone. Are they mocking him? Another is reaching out with a leafless branch for the mutilated head of a pig. And then there are the chairs, always the chairs. They tell a story of sloth when someone is sitting in them, and of action when they are unoccupied - symbolic of the madness of whoever couldn’t stay put to endure an inner hell and be cremated there, or who is off strolling merrily through the corridors of paradise. The eyes of a blind woman stare off towards a point outside of the frame in which she has lived for so long with her singular mascot, a small monkey that sits in front of her tied to her chair.

But few are as disturbing as ‘The Attendant’ (1991). Within a space delimited by three visible walls a man in the centre of the scene mops a floor whose brutal brushstrokes his bare feet seem to be trying to pacify. Behind him is a man hunched over facing a wall who refuses to acknowledge his presence. To the right of the main figure, a small window on the wall serves to frame the face of a man who, from the outside, scrutinises him as he undertakes the task of cleaning. In the foreground, facing us, an empty chair.

Just like in the 19th century print of the two men outside the cantina, Jonathan Barbieri’s work also carries a strong sense of exterior ness. I refer to the situations contained in his work and those which the characters protagonise: we see them fixed in a profound melancholy, in the rampant madness of a vacant gaze, in laughter spilling from a gaping mouth, in their bloody wounds, their disputes, their arm-wrestles, or in the simple act of drinking. We discover that this apparently naked intimacy dissipates and presents itself as proof of the implicit: the intrinsic has mutated into the extrinsic. Proof that lies in the frontier between the worlds of the interior and the exterior.

This type of internal structure in Barbieri’s work is frequently repeated in the series ‘La Pierde Almas’. Here, we find the same neatly scenographic order as in previous work in the sense that nobody blocks anyone else’s view. Everything is visible; each figure plays his part without interrupting the one next to him. Although this may seem like a compositional formality, it in fact goes far beyond the rigid structural necessity of the painting and becomes an expressive need for Barbieri as an author -but above all, as an accurate and discreet observer of space - in this case, of a cantina.

It is worth noting here the close relationship between the sketch and the final painting, which in many cases is a product of sketched notes taken in situ. For example, such is the case with ‘Arm Wrestlers’, a piece born from a sketch on parchment whose delicacy doesn’t weaken the scene it describes. Although for reasons of artistic necessity and through the evolution and the logical modification of an idea in process, ‘Arm Wrestlers’ did suffer changes. Two obvious examples: the crow being squashed by the figure on the left as he battles his opponent; and the light-bulb which has been substituted by a red circle that now indicates the presence of a zone of power as opposed to a light source. The figures in the background have also mutated and all of their postures have been changed.

Such analytical reading might seem cold but it is nevertheless indispensable in order to understand the very particular way in which Jonathan Barbieri goes about his work. Yet if we now put traditional ways of approaching painting (and of approaching paintings) in the dock, we discover that a substantial number of visual artists deal with the task of expressing themselves on a daily basis in much the same way. Furthermore, whatever it is they see, what in turn makes us see, what they share with us through their language, are moments in the story of a life that we, as spectators, are now a part of. It hardly matters whether we’ve been to the cantina ‘La Pierde Almas’ or not, and even less whether or not we frequent it or any other cantina. What is important is that through the work of Jonathan Barbieri we become a kind of privileged witness. Through him we can get closer to this world which he describes in his art and in his own personal language.

Combined with this, the literary works of Ulises Torrentera and Guillermo Fadanelli add emphasis to this new addition to urban legend. As soon as they were off the press the texts manifested themselves irrefutably as stories in their own right. Who would indict the written word? If it be true, then the original sin belongs solely to some fact reconstructivist for broadcasting them to the ears of others. But this is creation, and therefore its truth is intrinsic in every line.

Is there any doubt that the guardian angel of drinkers truly exists? The images, like the words that accompany them, are as alive as the memories that surge forth in the wake of long hours spent in a cantina. When memory is recovered, the soul returns home on two horses that gallop as one. As a parallel creation, the images and the words weave together a story, making a solemn statement about the errings of the soul. There is nothing left to do but go back to the place where we saw it last.

1. – a fermented drink derived from an agave plant that is cultivated specifically for the purpose.