saltfineart

Taken from the text by Emiliano Valdes

THE MODERN REALITY OF MOISES BARRIOS

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 Illustrations of the Pacific, a series of oil paintings and watercolors by Moises Barrios, beautifully captures daily life along Guatemala’s Pacific Coast.  Barrios borrowed the title from a late 19^th century publication, “La Ilustración del Pacífico” (Illustrations of the Pacific), wherein Guatemala was envisioned as the next grand maritime power.  Thus, the eponymous title alludes to a vision of Guatemala’s prosperous future that never materialized.

The complex irony of the title makes Illustrations of the Pacific more than a simple, if stunning, series of seascapes and landscapes.  These paintings are elegiac testimonies of Barrios’ attachment to his culture and a mordant criticism of the colonialism that left the coast behind.  Barrios’ paintings are lushly suggestive and critical at the same time—- in this way, with this simultaneity, they are modern portraits of a coastal patch of the world that never modernized.

The images are painted from photographs but their emotive distortion of pictorial space separates them from a prim realism and ushers them, stylistically, into modernity.  More expressionist than realist, the paintings are pure, pristine and poetic.  The evocative series remains tethered to the crude reality of Guatemala’s Pacific coast.  Illustrations of the Pacific portrays the paradox of Guatemalan life—- an unspoiled and luminous coastline without the spoils—- amenities, services and infrastructure—– of modern life.

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Illustrations of the Pacific is deeply nostalgic.   The coast becomes the promise of an eternally delayed future, the keeper of a dream deferred.  Life on the Pacific, then and now, as Barrios puts it “was what it was.”   We are reminded that in one hundred years nothing has changed.

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The paintings are what is often called “regional contemporary.”  The subject matter is distinctly Guatemalan— the town taking an evening bath in the ocean, or an affect less Guatemalan girl rowing a boat— and the time is now.  The sensibility of the painter is cosmopolitan and contemporary— he has seen the world.  He knows that the regional is never regional once seen as such.

Barrios paints without embellishment, without adjectives.   Each painting in Illustrations of the Pacific is a visual haiku— the optical equivalent of three written lines poetically portraying the haunted and haunting beauty that is the soul of the Guatemalan Pacific.