A Mystery with Subtleties

María Clara Bernal: Maestro Barrios, I read in a recent newspaper column by Jota Mario that he found two collages made by you and José Javier Jorge, which he described as Surrealist collages.1 So, if we can start there, it would be fabulous.

Álvaro Barrios: Yes, well before Duchamp, I encountered Surrealism, but always through texts, books, let’s say. It’s not that I was a bookworm, as they call it, but since I was a child, there was a library in my house to help me open my eyes. I felt lucky to have this wealth of books at home. Even before I learned to read, I asked my mother to read me comic strips from the newspapers. I was fascinated by some of them, especially the silent ones. I don’t know if they still exist, but some came out in images without text so you had to interpret them with only the images. I was fascinated by such sequences of images, seeing them as narratives without words.

Many people read books but don’t know how to read them. So they go through the books, and the books don’t go through them. You must know how to read between the lines, whether in a situation, life, or anything else. So, when I found a book by Juan Eduardo Cirlot about Surrealist poetry, I knew what to do.

Very early on, I was also interested in all the books about esoterism, including El retorno de los brujos (Le Matin des Magiciens) by Jacques Bergier with Louis Pauwels. In the edition I read, the first page contained a sentence by Paul Éluard that read something like this: Other worlds exist, but they exist within this one. This opened my mind to imagination, fantasy, and interior life. My inner self was revealed to me, and I understood that we all have one. I am referring to the possibility of being a variety of beings.

I was curious about the exact location of those “other worlds.” If we think about it, it is like feelings such as happiness or sadness: we never wonder where in the body such feelings are located. All we know is that they are not on the sidewalk across the street or in the closest town; they are here, inside us. We are both talking; I am here on this side, and you are on the other side of this table, a meter away. It is so close, yet each one has that inner world, which is so deep, rich, and mysterious, right? There is a whole universe in a space as small as this room.

We are microscopic in the face of the dimension of the universe. And yet, these microscopic beings that we are, compared to that immensity, have a supremely rich interior life. Rich enough to confirm Shakespeare’s phrase from Hamlet: “Oh God, I wish I could be so small that I could fit in the shell of a nut, but at the same time so big that my soul wouldn’t fit in infinite space.”

I was fascinated by Paul Éluard in the Anthology of Surrealist Poetry, but I had a primary relationship with this genre. My mother read a lot of poetry, but it was romantic poetry; I can’t say that I rejected that, but later I learned that poetry has many facets, too, and there are many ways of expressing oneself, not only through literature. But the poets who are, let’s say, lyrical, like Meira del Mar in Barranquilla, were not interesting to me. I wanted something different. It seemed to me that saying beautiful phrases was not enough for something to have a poetic character and that it may be possible to make a poetic phrase with beautiful words, but it is not the only way.

MARÍA CLARA BERNAL: From what I read, you seemed more interested in the poetic form that makes realities collide.

Álvaro Barrios: Exactly. It is just like that. I learned about that in the book of Surrealist poetry, which acted as a catalyst for my interests. I was sixteen years old. Imagine someone talking to you about another world within yourself at that age. It sounded to me like mystery and spiritism, which led me, as a young person interested in art, to think about my work as a way to channel mystery. That interested me. You tune in, and your work flows from there, but it comes from something spiritual.

María Clara Bernal: Yes, can you speak more about that interest in channeling the mystery, please?

Álvaro Barrios: As I have been saying, my encounter with Surrealism and almost immediately with Duchamp was initially through concepts. The first book I found about Duchamp was a long interview without images. After that, I got to see the pictures of his work, but since I had already read about the concepts worked by Duchamp, I could see his works from another perspective. This was in the 1960s. My first exhibition was in 1965. I was still studying, but I had concluded that Surrealism is the only modern movement that survives and fits with the contemporary.

María Clara Bernal: Yes, and you say it is not even a movement.

Álvaro Barrios: Yes, not exactly. Because, to use a romantic word, they incorporated emotion. Surrealism was saved by its interest in the inner life, the parallel worlds that existed next to reality. They presented themselves as a movement that included many things, like politics. And there were great passions, and suddenly, they rejected a member if he had a conservative concept in other aspects of life. They did not conceive that a Surrealist could be conservative at the same time. It started as a movement, but it transcended the concept of movement, right? Because artistic movements, as they taught me later in a spiritism session, and we’ll talk a little bit about that later, artistic movements were going to be obsolete.

María Clara Bernal: Can we talk more about those spiritism sessions?

Álvaro Barrios: I said a moment ago that my encounter with Surrealism and Surrealist poetry was in the 1960s. But about ten years later, in the 1970s, I encountered spiritism and the esoteric. So, my life acquired a different dimension, which was already associated with art because I was already a professional artist. I didn’t consider myself a professional artist when I started studying Surrealism. I was a person who liked to draw and who had a lot of interests. But in the next decade, I was already a professional artist, and it was when something exploded inside me, something I didn’t expect. I didn’t expect it because I didn’t know I would be a medium.

My entry into spiritism was entirely empirical because of personal experiences that started as a game. It was through the comic strip “Dick Tracy” that I began this path. I was fascinated by the villains in it. There was a character that always caught my attention. It is a woman, supposedly ugly, called “the Ugly Christina.” This was a strange woman; her best friend was a Native American who could read a wooden board called “The Tablet of the Spirits,” a board called the Ouija. The comic strip showed how the Ouija was used.

A card moved on the surface with the help of the spirits and stopped on a letter. That’s how the messages arrived. Ouija boards became so popular in the 1960s. When I went to Italy, I was in mourning because, in 1966, I don’t remember, well, Cristina died. Because the bad guys in the comic strip had to die, they punished them, right?

María Clara Bernal: I have heard you say that art is a mystery with subtleties. I am interested in what mystery means for your work. It doesn’t seem to be the unknown but the resistance of the unknown to be known. It is a systematic attempt to unveil that always fails. There is no end to the mystery.

Álvaro Barrios: Yes, it is like what you must know, and that will never be known because one penetrates and continues to penetrate and continues to penetrate, and there is no end in the mystery. Let’s say there is a passion for navigating the mystery. Surrealists also open that door for us because, through that mystery, one enjoys creation.

As you may have noticed, I have always drawn parallels between literature and the visual arts. In the case of Surrealism, I always find them inseparable. It was a movement that included literature, visual arts, and other things. But I was fascinated when I read about Magritte because they asked him on one occasion what his first Surrealist painting was, and he replied that it was Le jockey perdu (The Lost Jockey) of 1926. This was an apparently classical representation, where you see a forest and a rider crossing the forest. That’s all you see. He made a few versions, but the first was very, very, let’s say, academic. A man on horseback crossing a forest. So, the interviewer asked him why? Why, why is that his first? Why do you think that was your first Surrealist painting? What is Surrealist about it?

The title says it. The rider is lost. Being lost is already a broken reality. There is a break. How many times do you get lost in life? You rarely have that experience—almost none, you see. You need to get lost, but . . . Well, I don’t know. Magritte’s horse and rider were lost. They were riding and didn’t know where they were coming from or where they were going. And they were in the forest. Yes, for the Surrealists, it’s a meaningful forest. Is that why he said it? Possibly. He didn’t clarify much, did he? I realized that his realism was of a very subtle sophistication, as is his painting. In his painting, some Surrealist images are a little more evident than what he said about the rider. Because the picture of the rider is very conceptual, the concept is what validates that it is Surrealist.

María Clara Bernal: Shall we continue with your history in the realm of spiritism?

Álvaro Barrios: Yes. In the United States, and I wonder if they do as well here, they used to sell Ouija boards in toy stores as if they were chessboards, so I bought a board of the spirits in a toy store. It was very similar to the one that came out in Dick Tracy. In the seventies, when I returned from Italy to Barranquilla, my passion for comic strips was intact, and so was my interest in spiritism. I started practising with my siblings; I was the eldest and around my twenties.

I had a conventional wooden board with a small card with a hole in the middle that was supposed to slide on the board, finding letters to create sentences dictated by the spirits. Our hands were moving uncontrollably. It was an involuntary movement. Soon, I was too impatient to wait and write a word, letter by letter, so I decided to create my own Ouija board. On it, I wrote articles, verbs, and everything to put together the sentences faster. It reminded me of the collage poems I had already done in the 60s with the Nadaistas group because my encounter with the Nadaistas was in the 60s, before the encounter with Spiritism, before I went to Italy.

María Clara Bernal: Yes, I have seen some of your drawings from the 1960’s when you were part of the Nadaistas. Can we talk about that stage of your career?

Álvaro Barrios: Yes. It’s a fascinating thing. Yes, because that was my first contact with the Nadaista group with a branch in Barranquilla, which Álvaro Medina led. We met through Colombian painter Delfina Bernal; she was his girlfriend and my friend. I’ve been friends with her for a long time. It was with her second husband, a gringo named David Leidig, that I started a project that turned out to be very important. He was the one who took the photo of me in a trance for Autoretrato espiritista (spiritist self-portrait). He was a bridge.

María Clara Bernal: What about Delfina Bernal?

Álvaro Barrios: Well, I was her friend at that time because we both went to Bellas Artes. She was [Alejandro] Obregón’s student there, and I attended as a visitor. Obregón lived across the street from Bellas Artes in La Perla, now a library. So, it was effortless for us to live together in the intellectual world of Barranquilla, of visual arts, especially since everything was so close, right? Like Bellas Artes in front of Obregón, and on one floor, I saw Obregón; on the other floor, I saw Álvaro Cepeda Samudio. Yes, and then, Delfina was his student and a very good friend and introduced me to him. We were all very young; I had just started studying architecture, my first career. In Delfinas’ studio, Alvaro Medina showed us some issues of the Mexican journal El corno emplumado (The Plumed Horn) (1962–1969) This journal brought together many young art students.

María Clara Bernal: I was going to ask you about that because I know that in 1965, you collaborated with this Mexican journal, which has a strong relationship with Surrealism.

Álvaro Barrios: Delfinas’ study was on top of a garage, and the floor was made of wood boards. That’s where we would meet, read each other, and where Álvaro Medina came up with the idea that we would do collage poems that we published in El corno.

So, El corno emplumado, as you know, emphasized Latin American or American poetry because there were also poets from North America, and some parts were bilingual, the Beatniks, and all that. They even published a number dedicated to Nadaism. Still, before the release of the number devoted to Nadaismo, I was very excited, and without saying anything to anyone, I sent some drawings to their postal address. Sergio Mondragón, the director of the journal, was thrilled with them, and they were published illustrating a poem by Ernesto Cardenal.2 He was my idol; Ernesto Cardenal’s poetry fascinated me; all these artists and the Nadaista poets fascinated me, too. Later, I found that they also were related to Surrealism. I thought, “How wonderful it is to have a concept of poetry like this!” When Ernesto Cardenal wrote, he put his thoughts in the form of a verse, one on top of the other, or sometimes it was like prose, but there was a poetic spirit that was the essence of everything. He was a poet in the way he expressed himself using everyday terms. I was fascinated even when he would write the headlines of the newspapers. And besides that, he was a priest. He was a Catholic priest; He was a Trappist monk. I think he’s already dead.

He read the neon advertising signs that he could see on the highway from the monastery and thought they were “proclaiming the name of the Lord.” For him, this was the equivalent of applauding God; imagine that . . . to me, this was beautiful! He turned his experience into a mystical, contemporary thing, and it’s still something very current; in fact, his poems seem to be written now. Cardenal supported the Nicaraguan revolution while he also had his own spiritual center on an island in Lake Nicaragua, on the island of Solentiname. After the Revolution of Nicaragua, he was appointed Minister of Culture.

A photo of him taken during the visit of Pope John Paul II shows a scene where Cardenal, already a Minister, knelt to receive the Pope’s blessing. The Pope is standing in front of him, lifting his finger as if he were scolding him. It’s incredible because he did not get the blessing; the Pope scolded him for being a member of a left-wing revolution. In the photo, Cardenal was kneeling on one knee, looking like a saint, and the Pope looked like the devil.

María Clara Bernal: Can you talk to me about Barranquilla’s Center for Psychical Research, which you mentioned earlier? I am interested; since you talked about being a speaking medium, how did you understand and act upon the proposal to open yourself to other worlds?

Álvaro Barrios: I had this power. It was when I returned from Italy, as I told you before, that I started with spiritism, I experienced it as a game, I didn’t know exactly how it worked or what was happening. I got scared, because one day I received the visit of a spirit that called himself “Hemingway.”3 At the beginning I believed it to be true, but afterwards I remembered that [Ernest] Hemingway had committed suicide and people that die in that way cannot be guiding sprits. I thought I would learn something, but a series of psychophysical phenomena started taking place. For instance, I was working in an advertising agency, and on Mondays we used to have meetings around a round table to work together on the campaigns. We each had a paper pad for taking notes; I was writing on the pad when suddenly, my hand jumped, and it started writing. It claimed to be Ernest Hemingway and said he needed to tell me something important. I could not pay attention to the spirit, so I ignored it, but strange things started to happen. I knew about the spiritism center in Barranquilla, which was run by elders.

María Clara Bernal: And you went? How did you know about it?

Álvaro Barrios: The person who ran it was a friend’s mother; her name was Amalia Bula Simons. She was famous because of her spiritism powers, and she had all the possible medium powers. I was allowed to attend a session on a Saturday. I wanted to ask about my situation with the spirit of Hemingway, which was really bothering me. It was messing and altering my life with silly messages. They warned me about this particular kind of spirit, which they called “burlón” (joker), and they told me how spirits with a high spiritual evolution do not work in such fashion. Instead, guide spirits show you a path and help you navigate life. They drove away the joking spirit, and I left. Two weeks later, I felt something was missing because I had been connected to a universe and then I wasn’t anymore; I realized I had returned to the normal world. I decided to return to talk to her and asked why that spirit came to me; I was curious to know if this happened to everyone who used the Ouija board.4 I wanted to know if I could connect with a highly evolved spirit. She told me about my condition as a medium but asked me not to pursue it just yet. I was too young, and it was not a game. I asked her to help me develop my capacity as a medium.

María Clara Bernal: Of course, because your artwork was the channel for you.

Álvaro Barrios: Yes, my work was the channel. She agreed to see who my spirit guide was. She talked to her, and my spirit agreed to communicate and guide me right there. Actually, she didn’t state a name; I gave her a name.

I then returned home and started communicating with her without the help of professional mediums or the Ouija board. The first thing I did was write, because I realized I was doing that the first time a spirit visited me. I was a writing medium. There were long conferences; then, the concentric drawings came to me.

María Clara Bernal: Were the concentric drawings dictated to you by your spirit?

Álvaro Barrios: Yes

María Clara Bernal: When you speak about your spirit and encounter with her, you talk about liberation; you mention that the spirit set you free. I am interested in hearing how this worked for you?

Álvaro Barrios: Yes, although I still have the power, this reached its productive peak in the 1970s, mostly in writing and drawing. The spirit helped me evolve as a person and as an artist. It is my north; I am no exception to what happens to most artists; we have stale periods, some periods where nothing comes to mind, so I ask my spirit for help.

María Clara Bernal: You refer to the help of the spirit as light . . .

Álvaro Barrios: Yes, I’ve always asked for light, and it works!

María Clara Bernal: I have one last question for you. When you made the series The Dreams with Marcel Duchamp, you wrote a wonderful account of a dream about your childhood. It is about some things that belonged to you at that time, and that burst into flames. I wanted to bring that piece into this conversation and create some links with your interest in the other worlds that exist within this one. How do you put your dreams, childhood, spiritism practice, and all of that into dialogue?

Álvaro Barrios: You are asking me how I do it. Well, that is a mystery to me. When I started the series Los sueños con Marcel Duchamp, I just thought about the concept of a dream. Sometimes, people ask me if these are dreams that I have had for real or if they are waking creations. They are dreams in so far as the realities I described are not the product of logical thought or conscious elaborations. It is, instead, a revelation that will only happen if you are open to it in the same way that you must be open when your contact with spirits is happening.

I wrote almost one hundred different dreams. Some are audacious, and others are philosophical. I did it, granting myself the freedom to write automatically without any argument with which to hold the sentences together. There were so many, but I remember one clearly; it is a short one. It goes like this: “I dreamt that Marcel Duchamp had declared art, everything that exists. And then he declared that only what does not exist is art.”