La Traviata, 2019

Walter Barrientos  

Originally from Peru, Walter Barrientos is today a painter of international recognition. Established in Toulouse since 2001, he is characterized by a colorful figurative and narrative painting translating an incessant back and forth between past and future. He develops a universe that is both dreamlike and chaotic, populated by human and animal figures where a personal story that irremediably intersects with that of the Andean world.

He is defined above all by a reappropriation of the collective myths that he expresses through the painting medium that he practices as an autodidact. He was initiated into this practice as he learned to live: in complete freedom.

"As an engraver, I thought I was dead", the future of a technique considered too old seemed blocked. “I painted for a while because engravings were growing inside me. I had to let them sleep. And I wake them up today as after a long sleep. The return to engraving is the result of a long wait. In the darkness of this silence, the constant back and forth between my past world and my current events arose in me. The journey between yesterday and today was a dormant expectation. The engraving slumbered there.

I hoped for a bridge, a way, a passage between two worlds, that of my origins imbued with earth and plants and that of today steeped in culture and knowledge. A silent gestation was operating. I have given birth to a way back. By engraving again, I return to an exploration abandoned more than fifteen years ago in Peru. I rediscover the gestures, not of the artist but of the earthworker: I cut furrows, I uproot, I weed, I form mounds and drains, I sort the good and the weeds ".

- Walter Barrientos