Return to the Origin
Fernando Gálvez de Aguinaga | 2018
Julieta Barrios's works burst into metal with a charge of nostalgia, fantasies, lines turned into feelings, photographic transfers that she herself takes and chooses to underline the emotions that overwhelm her and tell us about the mechanisms of memory unfolding a street and their architectures in etching. An artist with dazzling intuition, she has the ability to turn urban settings into metaphors of the most intimate feelings, but the life of a sensitive being is just like the engravings of this creator, when a lack of love invades us, geography or the city are lost to us. They show very different than if we have the euphoria of a relationship that is born. Juliet's world, as it happened in the novels and poems of Romanticism, is seized by feelings, it is not a mere reflection of physical space, it is a territory impregnated with deep and personal feelings.
But there are also all those pieces that border on the fantastic, it is no longer just the colors and lines that indicate the artist's passions, now memories like her grandmother's garden are full of childhood imaginaries, the girl what Juliet was lived among those fantastic beings, between the aromas of the kitchen, the games in the garden and the stories told by the older relatives, what seem to be fantastic beings today were experienced by the girl. Resolved with virtuosity that places her as one of the great printmakers of our time, with this exhibition Julieta begins an itinerary of her work that will surely place her name where it belongs on the national print scene. Her two central lines of work show her as a creative intelligence that has fully assimilated the lessons of contemporary art but also knows how to develop with expressive force, technical mastery and boundless imagination within the fields of classical engraving.