A MATTER OF TIME EXHIBITION - Alzueta Gallery - Barcelona 2018

Text by John Slyce

Bárbara Alegre has produced a piece with the title A Matter of Time that is the signal work that lends a title to this exhibition. The sixty-one days during which this project and exhibition were produced–begun in the waning days of September and encompassing all of October and then some of November–are represented as the colour of the sky Alegre experienced and recorded on each day and then faithfully translated in paint. This daily record is re-presented and bound as a calendar spanning those sixty-one days of autumn, or perhaps more poetically rendered in ‘the fall’.

Alegre’s focus is on time and season, but this is shot through a bodily engagement with sky. Sixteen pieces comprise this presentation: large collage pieces, paintings on linen and then those in gouache on embossed paper. The recording of things, processes and activities has often found a place in Alegre’s working method. The works in A Matter of Time follow suit in a conceptual manner that is both rigorous and bodily; the impact of this making on the rhythms of artist’s sleep, activities and body has been profound and lasting. Alegre witnessed and recorded the colour of the early morning sky each day as it presented its own hue, tint and shade and then on through the passing day. A fidelity and exactitude to the recorded values of blue and grey were adhered to given the importance she places here on magnitude and colour as a model of measurement. The periods depicted are in this sense both the colour values and magnitude of the time expressed in the making. These works are importantly non-referential.

Time is a subject but then so too is sky. The titles for these works are evident; they are descriptive and relate to memory rather than disclosing the exact information one would expect to be aligned with time and place. Whole Day, Feeling Blue, Day and Night, Dawn, Before Breakfast, At Lunch, After Dinner – these titles foreground the quotidian, the everyday, or diario. The Indo-European root of time–Dī or Dā–connotes part, or partition, to divide. This is a gesture that suggests a primordial connection with earth, sky and season developed long before the invention of clocks and the regimentation of time and our consciousness of its measure and movement marshalled by seconds, minutes and hours.

A fundamental part of our human condition is to have sky over our heads. This we take far too much for granted. A roof is indeed important to survival, but the sky offers more in the way of dreams and continuity, imagination and respite from the weight of the world. Bárbara Alegre’s A Matter of Time offers us a moment to lift our eyes and arms up to the sky and take time as matter measured in magnitudes of blue and being.

John Slyce, London 2018

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