alberto baraya

The series Expedición Rio, part of the project Estudos Comparados de Paisaje (1998–2018) by Alberto Baraya, offers a rare opportunity for observing the direct relationship between the work of the traveling artists who portrayed Rio de Janeiro’s landscape in the 19th century and the recent work of a notable contemporary artist. Even though he is Colombian, Alberto Baraya clearly drank from the well of the great landscape artists active in Brazil, since at times it seems that the background in his paintings are verbatim transpositions of landscapes by the traveling artists, but with the addition of nearly mythical animals, totally unexpected in this context. Actually, despite the obvious kinship with the work of those 19th-century artists, the similarity lies not in the simple repetition, but in the same posture that Baraya assumes while registering Rio de Janeiro’s incomparable landscape, with the aim of incorporating it as a backdrop of his fabulous interventions.

Alberto Baraya’s treatment of the landscape arises from the same enraptured contemplation of the landscape that characterized the work of painters of Rio de Janeiro vistas in the 19th century. Although they are also painted en plein air, Baraya’s works are not conceived like those of the artists who came only to capture the exotic scenery to present it for the European spectator’s appreciation. Certainly, since the result so closely resembles the production of the traveling artists, it can only be interpreted as being a nod to the works of artists who preceded Baraya over the course of the last 200 years. In fact, the concern for the “documentation of the landscape” that characterized the work of many of those traveling artists made them extremely painstaking in their precise depiction of the outlines of Rio de Janeiro’s dazzling landscape and the unique topography of its bay. Baraya likewise expresses his astonishment before the nature he observes to leverage his creation, applying his masterful technique to depict what he imagines the traveling artists saw: a Rio de Janeiro free of its current buildings.

Los músicos de Rio, an oil painting measuring more than four meters, bears echoes of a large vista by Emil Bauch, Panorama do Rio de Janeiro (1873), a colored lithograph on paper measuring 75 x 242.5 cm, as well as an 1860 work in pastel by Hagedorn, seen from behind, at an angle less used by other traveling painters. Other artworks, such as Rio de Janeiro desde Niterói, con pez volador falso (Dactylopterus volitans), which shows a specimen of a fish species known as the false flying fish, uncommon in Rio de Janeiro, leaping from the waters of the bay, reminds us of the great watercolors by E. E. Vidal, a British sailor and traveling painter specialized in sweeping vistas of Rio de Janeiro Bay. For its part, Águia-pescadora en Playa Vermelha, en Pan de Azucar, Rio de Janeiro more closely resembles the Rio de Janeiro landscape paintings made in the early 20th century, and Baraya returns to the same unusual vantage point used by Hagedorn to depict Sugarloaf Mountain for Macaco comendo goji berries en Pan de Azucar. The virgin forest that traveling artists astonishedly discovered in Brazil became one of the favorite themes of Baraya, who seems to have been clearly inspired by Debret’s and Rugendas’s depictions of the Brazilian plant life when he puts his Caracol gigante africano sobre palo brasil (Achatina fulica sobre Caesalpina echinata) within a backdrop of topical forest also evoked in Macaco con caracol gigante africano (Callithrix jacchus con Achatina fulica). Sugarloaf Mountain was, inevitably, one of the main motifs of the (professional or amateur) traveling painters who passed through the city in the first decades of the 19th century, at a moment when the opening of Brazil’s ports allowed for the reestablishment of the flow of foreign visitors, previously interrupted by the Portuguese colonizer. When Alberto Baraya overlays stones and skulls to the traditional landscape of Sugarloaf Mountain, he presents us with a renewed application of the landscape so often repeated by the 19th-century landscape artists, to the point where it became the postcard view avant la lettre of Brazil’s then national capital. The view of Dois Irmãos Hill before the many edifices built around it (as it could be seen from Leblon Beach in the 19th century or beginning of the 20th century) nevertheless presents an indistinct patch of color that resembles the current Vidigal favela, showing what Baraya wishes to remember without seeing. On this landscape, the artist overlays stones wrapped in sisal twine, once again surprising the viewer and reinforcing the theme of the pair, as also seen in the two stones on the sand of the beach. Today’s Rio de Janeiro appears in Rio desde o Parque das and in Caballo (Equus ferus caballus) en Lagoa, works in which Baraya leaves off from making a reference to the traveling painters and uses the same posture to recover the current cityscape, always overlain with stones found along his way or with animals that seem to have fallen from the sky.

Reference to the past is a constant in the artist’s current production, since the group of artworks by Alberto Baraya entitled Nuevas Hierbas de Palermo y Alrededores. Una Expedición Siciliana (2018) – part of his project Herbário de Plantas Artificiales (2002 and ongoing) made for Manifesta 12 Palermo at the city’s Botanical Garden based on a collection of plastic plants (made in China) and local botanical representations in ceramic – also recalls the printed work of the great European naturalists who visited Brazil throughout the 19th century, documenting its flora and fauna. Reporting the expeditions of those great naturalists led to the creation of magnificent albums with refined engravings of the Brazilian flora, often hand-colored, which combined scientific preciseness with extraordinary visual impact. Brazil thus furnished the theme for some of the most beautiful botanical books of the 19th century, and few countries had their flora documented with equal precision and beauty. With elements captured in Palermo and its environs, in the case of his Sicilian series, Baraya delicately re-creates the atmosphere of the herbariums of past centuries, giving them an interpretation that incorporates the new techniques now available to him.

For a scholar of artists from the past who enriched Brazilian culture with their visual reports, it is especially exciting to appreciate the work of a contemporary artist with such a profound understanding of comparable paths tread long before him.