Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro

He believes the challenge is to “step out of the model that celebrates the patrimonial value of treasures, and move on to a more questioning territory.” This implied questioning – jointly with curator Annette Carlozzi – the frontiers separating that which happens in the north from that which happens in the south, at the moment of the re-installation of the collection at The Blanton Museum. It implied bringing Waltercio Caldas and Carl Andre side by side; or distancing Paternosto from Botero, to exhibit the former alongside Jo Baer. “In 1970,” he specifies, “both produced almost identical works and they did not know each other. Jo was shown on the cover of Art Forum and César vanished from the scene. When he was rediscovered, he ended up being a derivative. That is why it is crucial to place those simultaneous works together.” At The Americas Society he inaugurated dialogue strategies and designed exhibitions that yielded control to Latin American artists ́ collectives, bringing the peripheral to the center. What is essential is that, at thirty-eight years old, he is aware that 20th-century art is still under construction in the continent, and that the approach to contemporary creation demands perspectives capable of placing even its own structures in a critical position. His background explains why he assumed the challenge of directing the CPPC, an institution that led the re-dimensioning of the great flow of abstract geometric art that crossed the south of the continent from shore to shore.

The flexibility of borders

Awareness of the role that Latin American culture had in Spain in the 20th century was not, in Gabriel ́s case, a result of his academic studies, but rather something that was in his blood. Like thousands of Galicians forced to migrate, his maternal grandfather, Andrés Barro, from whom he inherited his second name, spent part of his life in Havana, where he was dazzled, on his arrival, by this first sight of a metropolis, and where he learned how to read and make furniture. “I believe,” he remarks, “that this fluent exchange between the two cultures strengthened a trans-Atlantic culture.” Many years later, Fernando Pérez-Barreiro, his father, told him that when he was a child growing up in a town in La Coruña, where some relatives sent him Billiken magazine, he believed that any day he could take a train to Comodoro Rivadavia.

In London, where Gabriel arrived as a newborn baby and where he lived until ten years ago, because his father and his mother, Teresa Barro, chose to migrate and work as translators, resisting the extinction of the Galician language, he did not know what to answer when he was asked if he was British or Spanish. Besides acknowledging his hybridization, he always felt the call of those cities in the New World where, through immigration, cultures such as the Galician culture were preserved.

For this reason he studied Art History and pursued a degree in Latin American Studies, and at twenty-one years old, when he spent a semester in Argentina, an exhibition defined his destiny: it was Gyula Kosice ́s retrospective at the National Museum in Buenos Aires. Kosice ́s water and light sculptures filled him with wonder and with a delight comparable to his childhood dazzle, and revealed to him that, more than in any other field of culture, there was a blind spot in Europe ́s knowledge of the history of Latin American art. He has built his life around his attempt to illuminate this blind spot, which prevented the great pioneers of the South from becoming known.

The crucial exhibition The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, allowed him to experience the thrill of contextualizing that other notion in continental art “whose substance was the speculation of form and which emerged as one of the results of modernism in the large cities of the south,” with those cosmopolitan views that revealed the nearness between The New York of the 1940s and Buenos Aires. The exhibition marked a culmination in his trajectory, dedicated to breaking the stereotypes that condition the gaze on Latin American art to the demand of the exotic, to a “genuine” identity from which an eternally pre-modern and “different” image is expected. He points out that this has disastrous consequences, like that of granting the right of universality only to the center, to the production of the First World. “Artists,” he says, “draw maps that are not consistent with political borders. I am interested in that other geography in which they move.”

The dismantling of structures

His doctoral thesis for the University of Essex, in England, was focused precisely on that decade and on the fulgurant emergence of the MADI movement, whose works and documentations require a gaze as free from the prejudice of the exotic as from idealization. After David Elliott, director of the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, requested his advice for a great exhibition of Argentine art, he contributed to the formation of the University of Essex collection of twentieth-century Latin American art, which incorporated, through donations, works such as a 1942 Matta, and in which he also included artists who were not yet so visible at the international level, such as María Freire, whom he discovered by chance tracing Rothfuss and about whose work he would write a book, or as Siron Franco, who is still visible. “I do not believe,” he states, “that the system necessarily makes the best decisions on its own; I do not trust the filters of power that give visibility to an artist. Many are unfairly left aside. Those of us who work in this field have an obligation to loosen the restrictions of all paradigms.” Among them, the false academic rigor that does not trust in artists as sources of enrichment. His discovery of Jorge Macchi taught him that sometimes an artist has a project that is beyond the reach of the “authoritarian regulation system” on which art history is based. “The world of an artist is different. Knowledge arises from the ability to enter into his or her field and inhabit it openly.”

This attitude led him to contact Luis Camnitzer, who directed one of the thinking workshops focused on art and power that Gabriel organized as coordinator of the exhibitions program of Casa de América in Madrid. When he was requested to organize the 6th Mercosur Biennial in 2007, he invited Camnitzer to serve as pedagogical curator in the creation, not of an exhibition based on a spectacular model, but of a projection of contemporary art to the public in which it would really function as a tool for knowledge: activating the sphere of possibilities and responses of people such as those local teachers or the showroom watchmen that took possession of the Biennial.

By becoming head of the CPPC, “whose work in transforming the perception of Latin American art in the centers of power has been a success,” and whose amazing collection of geometric abstraction has already fulfilled a historical function from the point of view of changing the paradigm, he seeks to expand its models for dialogue and insertion in an even more global context. The expansion of its roster of publications, which implies support for research work, is a key element to meet this goal. The parallel dream is to take advantage of the strong recognition the collection has gained and expand the scope of the bridge it has created between Latin America and the world, in order to include the current production of contemporary art. “The idea that the art of the continent is already globalized is a mirage.” To transform it into a real space is his raison d ́être.