COLLECTION KEYS

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In his exhibition "Llave de Colección" (Key to the Collection), artist Juan Manuel Barrios invites us to journey through the history of tailoring and fashion, intertwined with his personal experiences in the world of sartorial craftsmanship and photography. His work emerges from an aesthetic that spans from the underground scenes of 1990s Montevideo and Buenos Aires to the globalized fashion runways. These experiences are staged in languages that traverse multiple mediums and converge in a personal selection from his archive, from which he conducts a visual investigation as a tailor, window dresser, photographer, and DJ.

In the art of tailoring patterns, rules are at play that complicate the language of garment-making. This territory is transformed by variables such as materials and their textures, measurements, surfaces, geometries, and reaction times. Ultimately, everything contributes to the symbolic and real circulation of the pattern and the object to be created.

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The artist proposes finding a possible path where the paper pattern used to make his first suit serves as the "Key to the Collection," a piece that, in fashion store windows, opens up the narrative of the displayed objects. In this sense, Roland Barthes, in his book "The System of Fashion," defines "fabric genre as the material that can indifferently fill the object or the support of signification"; the concept of fabric genre and pattern plays a fundamental role for the artist, who appropriates the metaphor of his profession as a tailor and takes the genre as a surface on which the patterns are inscribed, that is, on a cut-out surface that is installed on bodies as clothing, which can question what is inherited as a certainty of the "ought to be."

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The peculiarity of his proposal lies in the documentary and aesthetic value of photographs, a record that is both personal and universal, typical of a multifaceted artist. Photography is the main way in which Juan Manuel Barrios presents his themes. In this exhibition, he analyzes almost autobiographically the impact of political bodies on stage, the fold between the private, affective world, the world of the LGBTQ community, and the displacement from one city to another, where, almost like a flaneur or dandy, he constructs ways of creating and operating in the world of fashion and design. The artist takes the performative nature of his personal scenes to transform them into active traces in the making of the work.

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Two photographic series operate with a forceful impact: the first is "Parallels and Crux-fiction", which is directly linked to the inherited models that have been broken to be transformed. Two photographs capture the artist's creation as a tailor, two beings whose faces do not designate genders, but rather the antagonistic garments that drain to renew their own construction of gender, a bleeding heart that poetically pulsates to break free from established norms and reconfigure spaces of pleasure. Barrios affirms that he conceives these works "for the sake of our identity, which we also break with our imposed, sometimes unwanted heritage. The garments I make symbolize the starting point to reconfigure our identity desire."

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The counterpoint to this series is "Crucifixion", a triptych of photographs whose poetry presents three elements: the tailor's scissors, his sewing machine, and the crucifixion of his suit, in a natural setting. It is the creative, dialectical process, the perfect lines of the objects, the private life, that evokes the surface of inscription and the challenge of giving rise to something new. The suit itself is placed as a material that is liberated from the body and becomes one with nature, while at the same time it seems to act as a veil of Maia, enabling us to see beyond the principle of inherited reason.

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Between these two series, the work "Key to the Collection" emerges, with its printed patterns serving as the counterpart or fold of each piece. For the artist, this key is also a key to disruption, an admiration for the Apollonian lines of haute couture, of those great spaces where the fashion designer Alexander McQueen displaced the rigidity of creation to generate filtrations between the different languages of art: to go towards the exquisite and the undisciplined.

 

The visual narrative of this exhibition proposes areas of conflict and tension between fetishes.

It is activated by vectors such as music, which led him to become a DJ and to print in golden letters the emblematic song from the Phankey-Rythm Doctor album "Mad Poet," which tells us about the pleasure and meaning of underground codes, which in both Buenos Aires, the city where the artist lived, and Montevideo, were a place of learning, where what often becomes nourishment for generations is diagrammed.

 

Going to the intimate fibers of this autobiography, the artist rescues from his archive a video that corresponds to the record of a moment in that legendary Metropolis, a space where different people and their alter egos coexisted, a place that the common people might call a gay club, but that far from biases was a space for dissident bodies, for experiences specific to sexualities, pleasure, and the aesthetics of communities that struggled to find a territory of vital freedom. In this way, the exhibition is configured as a runway in time, and the artist activates our conscious presence.

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Two small-format works focus attention on the construction of another body on stage. It is a photographic series from a film by the well-known pornographic artist Jeff Stryker, where there is a course that recalls the path to the underground and also to what in tension disciplines the bodies.

 

While the underwear photograph of Calvin Klein models was an icon in the 90s, the artist intervenes in that photo, bringing it to the room, where desire and the discovery of a hot Buenos Aires are concentrated, with the crossing of molds that respond to the confection of the visual arts, fashion, and music and its photographic records.

There, Juan Manuel Barrios proposes a complicit and clear path, a story full of beloved objects that he shares with a stirring hope.

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Jacqueline Lacasa, Curator.