Cidade do Aço
Asfalto Gallery – Rio de Janeiro, 2022
We may live in interesting times, where the age of images has, at last, reached its most. Images measured in millionaire quotas, digital museums, virtual artists; a profusion of creators networked to infinity. Celebrity artists, celebrated artists; such an inflated status of recognition raises the question: what is (or what will be) left of artist artists? Without romantic delusions of discriminating what fits or what does not fit in artistic making, in such interesting times, the question is: where does the artisanal dimension of the artistic gesture of producing an image persist? Or, even further, in the specific context of this exhibition, and of an artist like Daniel Barreto, what is the gesture that best describes the work of an Artist Painter in the era of the image heyday?
Blurring the stains, smearing the edges, capturing the light, merging the colors, making it appear, making it disappear, impressing, imitating, challenging, figuring, disfiguring. There was no lack of formulas or verbs in the history of art trying to unravel the painter's task. But the beauty of the artistic coefficient is in the singularities, and when a great painter like Daniel appears, he will always be the first and the last in his own tradition. This one that we, privileged spectators, can dedicate ourselves to trying to get to know.
To this end, a brief incursion into the artist's biography will be necessary: Cidade do Aço [Citty of stain], an expression that coined the title of this exhibition and also nicknames the munic- ipality of Volta Redonda, where Barreto was born, is a common theme to the set of canvases that composes this show. Cidade do Aço, refers to the industrial boom of the Municipality that received, during the Getulio Vargas Government, in the 50’s, the CSN (the national steel company), as part of a developmental project, which attracted families, especially from the South- east and Northeast, in a promise of social ascension and economic prosperity. In this scenario, of mixed family traditions that goes from the cerrado to the sertão, Daniel lived his childhood and youth, fronting the background of a city that was both rural and industrial, and the result of a fast and non planned urbanization process, that also was the protagonist of a few mile- stones in the history of Brazil, such as the CSN strike in 1988, the privatizations of the FHC government in the 90s, culminating in the crises and decline of the national industry.
Entering this biographical universe is important not in order to explain a certain aesthetic or to reveal curiosities about the artist’s life, but because this story builds the singularity of the very unique brushstroke of Daniel Barreto, a legit Painter Artist. There is a tactile-optic space that is built in the paintings present in this exhibition, which is revealed in the density of these canvases: in the weight of the oil paint carried on the canvas surface, in the beauty of a figurative seduction, in a palette of colors that sometimes is wormer, sometimes is coller, but that is always harmonious, thought out, studied, just like as of a master painter. However, beyond that, the uniqueness of these works lies in the fact that Daniel Barreto's main subject is time, and a very particular time to be said, one that emerges from the artist's intimate connection with the temporalities of the future, past, and present of this so called Cidade do Aço.
Barreto paints layers that coexist in a temporal disparity, using masks to build the surface of the canvas to remove them at a certain point of the process, breaking the image and revealing a background from a different time, which start to build the same world of overlapping stories coexisting in the same painting. This extractive method of the artist can be understood, after all, as a particularity of his brushstroke: removing to reveal, extracting to compose. Thus, understandable illustrations of ordinary and nostalgic scenes such as a family coffee in the after- noon, a child in the playground, the local flora or the ornament on the grandmother's table, are interrupted by almost violent mechanical gestures of ripping part of the canvas, extracting information and revealing gaps filled by traces of a previous or later scene, one adding to the other, forming a sort of Image that is very signature of the Artist.
Just like that, Daniel paints the history of Cidade do Aço: a history of a city, of a factory, o a certain countryside lifestyle, that mixes with his own personal history, and which mixes with the history of Brazil. Evoking a tenderness of someone who misses family afternoons, tales of a place that has never been seen, a simple, calm, slow life, lying in the affection of those “al- most unimportant” things. Daniel seems to rescue these images from the memory, as fragile as a flower that grows on the asphalt, and it seems to want to protect them from the harshness of the industry's steel: sharp, rigid, while he does not ignore the harshness of it, on the contrary, when he tells this stories, he reveals the amount of iron behind of it. Daniel can be, errone- ously, considered a nostalgic artist, but he is not because he is not satisfied with regretting the lack of something that passed, instead, when rebuilding these stories in his paintings, he mix- es portions of "then", "now", and "there" in a non linear timeline. Painting Daniel Barreto convinces us that time not only raises but destroys beautiful things, that cities are imaginary, that steel can be as soft as the tip of a paint brush, that the most beautiful things are those considered without emphasis, and that there is still time for art, and therefore, to be an Artist Painter.