Fernando Castro Flórez ///

Footnotes on the work of Pedro Barateiro

Uncertainty surrounds the painting: its (inanimate or scatological) endgame needs an end. It has been necessary to be expanded in order not to become a fossile, through so much modern obsession for “autonomy”. This is not so much of the factt hat the destiny of the imaginary being the shapeless or that the abject might be our main expressive experience, nor even that the collapse has been produced in trying to respond to the question as to the conditions that make a painting be seen as such, something rightly pointed out by Douglas Crimp. The problem that it articulates is that of the application of painting; that is, decision about the effective position that corresponds to it. The critical-political position or the sociologism are not the only ways out from a labyrinth in which there has been the neutralising of many affections and no doubt many provocations have been rhetoricised or legitimised since the ironic pose.