DOMINGO BARRERES: LAS MENINAS, EARTHLY DELIGHTS AND OTHER INVESTITURES

DECEMBER 5, 2003-JANUARY 10, 2004
OPENING RECEPTION FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2003 6-8 p.m.

White Box is pleased to present the work of Domingo Barreres, a Spanish-born Boston painter. The series of paintings are inspired by the 1656 Velazquez Las Meninas, Hieronymous Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights combined with a rich layering of other more personal and politically charged concerns and imagery. Barreres' Las Meninas series explore themes the artist has described as "obsessive ambition, beauty as mask for hidden agendas, or how anachronistic notions of identity may jeopardize such human traits as curiosity, imagination, carnal appetite, and love through sexual expression----even rationality itself".

In a style that brings to mind seventeenth century virtuoso Old Masters, placed in the context of today's conservative backlash that equates progressive and avant -garde art with depravity, Domingo Barreres positions gay iconography deadcenter in the current discourses on painting and politics. His striking subject matter is charged by the artist's passionate, first-hand experience of Catholicism and wanting to be a priest when he was growing up in Spain. His early fascination and love of the Catholic Church is today also mediated by the artistic, religious and cultural history on both sides of the Atlantic ocean. In particular, the recent sexual controversy within the Catholic Church in the US and Boston that is worked throughout the work with sections English and Spanish texts of poetry by Garia Lorca and Wallace Stevens.

The paintings are executed in a rich combination of materials ranging from traditional methods and including tar and plaster, watercolor and shellac, transforming the paintings into thick, rich, dark, glossy canvases that are interwoven with gilded linguistic dialogues common today in the creation of a contemporary conceptual space.

To quote Barreres: "The technical virtuosity of the seventeenth century parallels the new trust in rationality, a way of thinking recently divorced from myth and religion, but whose misuse, and subsequent illusion of superiority by the European elite, would cloud the future even to our present day".

PRESS

Gay Times
by Sheila Pepe

Virtuosity and Seduction
Domingo Barreres' provocative paintings are darkly complex, but devoid of irony By Sheila Pepe "Las Meninas, Earthly Delights and Other Investitures," an exhibition of Domingo Barreres' intensely envisioned paintings, is in its last ten days at White Box in Chelsea. Crafted with the visual text of Velazquez and Bosch and the literary texts of Garcia Lorca and Wallace Stevens these paintings reveal the artist's deep desire to look at the current state of humankind.

Spanish-born, Barreres, is a long-time Boston resident and senior painting faculty member at its Museum School. He is well known there for his appetite for seduction and virtuosity, painterly and otherwise. This body of work, an apparent inspection of these affections, brings highly personal material to what might be the most politically conceived work of his career.

Barreres continues to dazzle the viewer with an old-master deftness for intense lighting and spatial illusions, technical tricks that speak of a deep reverence for the history of painting, and a hedonistic relationship with the stuff itself. Each canvas holds a range that moves from skilled draftsmanship to wonton gesture, revealing a maker so at ease with his craft as to not concern himself with issues of style or aesthetic positioning. With an emotional severity that is rarely seen, these paintings lurch towards the operatic, while being totally devoid of irony. This, together with the artists' complex textural assertions, might set the viewer on edge. However, it's the blur of ideas, physicality, and emotion that elicit empathy with the painter, as we all try to order the world we share.

One painting might best reveal the sites of Barreres' personal dialogue with institutionalized virtuosity. In "Investiture" he plays with reverberations of the word's core meaning, virtue. Barreres casts himself, older and much heavier, as a scarlet-sashed cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. An insignia affiliated with "the painter," used in other canvases, is inscribed on the chest of his rich black cassock, conflating a reference to canons, both religious and art historical.

Here Barreres envisions himself as a powerful dignitary, with a kind but doleful gaze. Standing firm, perhaps as a standard for cardinal virtues, he is a mass enshrined by a sea of tiny falling buds that are like purple flames. With this provocative image, splendidly painting a deep identification with Catholicism in the midst of scandalous times, the artist ushers into us into a dark complexity of issues that may never be illuminated by paint alone.