Historians tell that Fernando de Magallanes reached the Pacific Ocean in November 1520, after a 37-day voyage through the strait which bears his name today, and an ensuing grueling 15-month voyage marked by uncertainty and mutinies on board. He called it his “mare Pacificum”, with the intuition, perhaps ancestral, that calm always comes after the storm. And so it proved to be: the calm came, briefly, as a prelude to new hardships and the death of Magallanes himself in the Philippines, three and a half months later.

Magallanes' voyage set the course for subsequent awe-striking odysseys. In the 19th century, a Frenchman of Peruvian descent named Paul Gauguin crossed the waters of the Pacific with the purpose of finding his lost paradise in Tahiti. In 1965, a Hollywood star, actor Marlon Brando, followed in Gauguin's footsteps and established his very own Arcadia in French Polynesia: a realm where the complexities of life are reduced to concepts such as abundance, simplicity, happiness and communion with nature.

These ideas emerge in connection with Mar Sobre Mar, Moisés Barrios' latest exhibition, which marks a return to the artist's exploration of themes such as lost paradises, identity, landscape and the Pacific Ocean.

Moisés first encountered the sea at the age of 21. The impact of that moment led to his repeated return to the Pacific, and recalls, in its decisive nature, the remote afternoon when Aureliano Buendía's father took him to see the ice. Twenty years later, a major new breakthrough occurred: Moises realized that the distance between Guatemala City and the Pacific Ocean was not measured in kilometers but in minutes, and that barely an hour and a half separated his home from the maritime landscape. Then came the recurring trips to the sea, the oil paintings and watercolors. It should be noted here that Moisés never learned to swim, which makes that immensity that we conventionally call “the Pacific” represent for him a mixture of panic and fascination.

The Pacific occupies a third of the Earth's surface and stands as the largest ocean on the planet. Its waters lap the coasts of countries as distant and different as Guatemala, Cambodia, China, New Zealand, Colombia, Indonesia, Russia, Peru, Costa Rica, Vietnam, Mexico, Thailand and Canada. The Pacific is the Total Ocean: a body of water difficult to encompass in thought, containing more islands than the other oceans combined.

Encompass the Pacific in thought. That seems to be the key idea. Or rather, the purpose behind the methodical practice that Moisés Barrios has embraced for almost four decades. A practice that involves confronting the maritime landscape, living it, portraying it, leaving it behind, enforcing a pause and returning to the starting point. This tireless method has given rise to pictorial series such as Iztapa (1987), Pacífico guatemalteco (1995), Arcadia (1999), La ilustración del Pacífico (2007), Vías fluviales (2016) and, now, Mar Sobre Mar.

NEW PARADISES

In Arcadia, Moisés Barrios proposed that the virgin and unexplored territory once called paradise disappeared long ago. “Paradise is lost, or rotten, because of insistence,” the artist seemed to assert at the time. In Mar Sobre Mar, Barrios retrieves and elaborates on that notion to suggest that today we are merely the distorted reflection of the good savage we had once intended to be. We are fictional characters in search of a reality that can offer us identity and purpose. We are Friday and Robinson Crusoe, fused and confused. We are the water, the reflection and the trail of a silhouette reflected in the water.

In Mar Sobre Mar, as Brando and Gauguin before him, Barrios returns to his island paradise to add a few layers of complexity to the reverie and to prove that life in the midst of nature coexists with disenchantment, loneliness and death. This is expressed in a palette of cold colors, in a distanced look and in a halo of mystery that comes, to a large extent, from the alternation of conflicting images. Found because they collide with each other and produce new, oblique and enigmatic meanings. Found because they toy with chance and thus respond to the idea of the found object proposed a century ago by the surrealists.

On the other hand, the interplay of found images is a sign of identity in the pictorial work of Moisés Barrios. An ingenious and indelible mark. In an exhibition catalog from the late seventies, the cartoonist Hugo Díaz commented, with a mixture of astonishment and admiration, on the relational character that has characterized Moisés' work ever since. "Next to a human figure, there is an animal figure followed by a plant, before arriving at an inanimate object. Everything can be interesting, mysterious or chilling for this artist who, knowing the technical secrets of the trade, knows how to endow each of his creations with climate, time and personal flavor."

Mar Sobre Mar links images that come from Moisés' fascination with the Pacific, alongside some others that have been created from photographs amassed by Moisés since the seventies. Island images that have been waiting patiently for decades to be added to a sort of cinematographic montage that integrates them and endows them with new meanings. Archipelago images, which establish unprecedented tensions between the Costa Rican beaches of Puntarenas, Conchal and Bahia Ballena, the musicians of Guatemala's Puerto San Jose, the truncated monuments of Xela's cemetery, the banana plantations of Santa Catarina Pinula and the coconuts waiting for tourists in some undefined place.

Thus, Moisés Barrios proposes a new cartography, thoroughly personal, intimate, and at the same time irrevocably universal. A map that allows us to relocate ourselves in the midst of the many landscapes that have shaped us, from those we inherited from nineteenth-century European romanticism to the later utilitarian visions that ended up in our contemporary postcards.

Half a century after Costa Rican writer Isaac Felipe Azofeifa tried to explain our national identities under the expression of the island self, Moisés Barrios refers to the islands we imagine so many times under the suggestive and ambiguous forms of reflection, channel and distortion. The leap from one figure to another is by no means minor. On the contrary, it is the result of constant and steady efforts over a long artistic practice; landscape upon landscape, island upon island, sea upon sea.

 — Jurgen Ureña. Dulce Nombre de Tres Ríos, Costa Rica, 2024.