Above: A folded photograph by Romero Barragan

The story of Romero Barragan (1942–2014), an avant-gardist painter and sculptor who fell into obscurity after the Marcos regime, and his journey to redefine an artistic practice that sought to obliterate the divisions of life and art.

One can perceive the 1980s in Philippine art as a starting point for various strategies in defining a true national art form. Romero Barragan, who formerly made what was narrowly thought of until now as “indigenous art” in the preceding decade, is an artist in painting, sculpture, or objets d’art who had an interesting cycle of political radicalization and regression during his lifetime.

While the debates between modernists and conservatives during the post-war period were out in the open, the artists of Barragan’s generation tackled their contradictions internally, and sometimes with seeming disregard for preconceived notions of what constituted “Filipino Art” or of the global movements that affected them.

Barragan takes materials from the context of everyday life and continually improves upon them (as an interweaving of art and everyday life), even after the presentation of the sculptural result or after being documented in photographs for the catalog. For many of his works, he has used materials derived from his personal and private life, which suddenly become communal instruments during an exhibition. Because of considerable demand for his work in the 1980s, the entanglement of art and life caused an extraordinary toll on his personal life, through a delimitation and almost denial of privacy or through the extreme exposure of his own world. On top of this, Barragan holds no fixation on notions of permanence or the need to preserve art, and with few exceptions, his works are intended to be ephemeral. His material provides the work with the very substance or model that would eventually destroy it. The use of stone or bronze would never be an option for him, as he destroys fundamentally the illusion that art is precious, even if the materials being used are actually precious on their own.

The material value of the work is relegated to the background, and the viewer’s perspective is steered towards the dynamics, tectonics, and orientation of each respective sculpture or installation work. In other cases, he combines traditional sculptures with a base of everyday objects and sometimes bases made of precious materials. Barragan reacts with his new combinations of shapes, colors, and lines. The base, regardless of its value, fulfills a utilitarian function and merges with the sculpture to form an amalgam, in the same method as Joseph Beuys’ amalgam of sculpture (where his refusal to adopt a specific style and medium in which to disseminate his images resulted in an extremely prolific and varied oeuvre). In his early collages and paintings, particularly those produced in his art school, artifacts or their mock-ups sit rather disturbingly amidst images of pop culture, and sometimes are intentionally displayed haphazardly. This results in the leveling of the material value of all elements as a work of art. The artist also hijacks the intermediality (from the Fluxus movement) of the artistic work. Similar practices by Marciano Galang and David Medalla were initiated in the 1950s–60s. The trio of Roberto Chabet, Benjamin Bautista, and Ramon Katigbak, who created the fictional persona of Angel Flores Jr., proposed a prototype for Romero Barragan: the blurring of life and art, and the view of art beyond a separation of genres, but ambivalently also the strengthening of discussions on the particularity of genre, especially in his newer projects, sculptures, and paintings. Barragan, like Flores Jr., was an expatriate artist, and he was amused by the freedom to produce new works by taking on many incarnations, or as he called it, “multiple selves,” across his lifetime.

Intermittent exiles and retreat to painting

The only son of Ignacia Sta. Monica, a pre-war classical painter, and Rodolfo Barragan, owner of a chain of department stores, Romero Barragan seemed destined for fame from the start. An A-student and an outstanding athlete, at the age of thirteen he could sketch and paint in the manner of the French Impressionist School. Capitalizing on his ruggedly handsome looks, he stood out in every school soirée; he had a pleasant manner and a remarkable knowledge of classical painting by old Filipino masters. At the age of twenty-one, he published a monograph on José Honorato Lozano, which was overwhelmingly commended by his professors.

He was a first-rate tennis player, a reputation that would present him with initial contact with President Ferdinand Marcos, who invited him to play a doubles match in Malacañang. A superb dancer, always impeccably dressed, and a meticulous academic, he was known as the life of the party, but he drank not a sip of alcohol. Everything about him seemed to lead to the highest achievements, or at least a life as a great artist or as the dutiful scion of an entrepreneurial family. But the terrible historical circumstances in which he happened and chose to live distorted his fate irreversibly.

At the age of eighteen, he exhibited his first paintings at the Luz Gallery in the style of early modernists, recognized by critics as valuable and interesting work, but which could certainly not be said to break any ground for Filipino art, which had started its romance with conceptual art and neo-Dada by the tail end of the 1960s. Barragan realized this, and three months later he left for Europe accompanied by his friend Dimas Balbuena.

In a post-Franco Spain, he acquired a taste for the discotheque, and the newly liberated society succumbed to his youth and charm, his intelligence, and his urbane mannerisms. It was said (by the gossip columnists of our local newspapers at the time) that he was on intimate terms with Cristina Montes de Alba, the socialite daughter of the Duchess of Alba. That, however, was nothing more than speculation. The guest room of the Duchess de Alba was transformed into a studio apartment and became a place for tertulias of poets, painters, anarchists, and their ilk. He began, but did not finish, a study of the life and work of the nineteenth-century painter Fabian de la Rosa, and painted portraits which few people have seen, since he made no attempt to exhibit them. He wrote in his diary that he was starting to move away from painting, and that upon learning of avant-garde movements in Europe via David Medalla, he would explore conceptual art but would rather get it straight from the horse’s mouth.

In 1983, after arresting a scandal that the Duchess of Alba might have caused after a bitter falling out, he left Spain and, after a short stay in Paris, visited Weimar in Germany. The land of the Bauhaus movement made a contradictory and mysterious impression on him: in his sporadic diary entries, he expressed his admiration for the remnants of Russian Constructivist art, professed by artists who learned from Bolshevik masters working in exile in the city before the war. His opinion betrayed the longing he felt for his homeland, an experience he saw reflected in the plight of the peripatetic Bauhaus movement. Six months later, he returned to Manila and took up residence in a comfortable apartment in Makati, where his faithful companion Dimas Balbuena, who had been obliged to remain in Hong Kong when he thought he had contracted HIV, joined him shortly afterward. (It was nothing but paranoia induced by a nasty practical joke committed against him by Barragan.)

The tennis court at the Manila Polo Club and artistic gatherings occupied much of his time in Manila. Barragan became interested in Chinese philosophy and attended lectures on the contentions of the “Hundred Schools of Thought” by Professor Alfredo Co, whom he had met at the Sorbonne.

Shortly before the outbreak of the EDSA Revolution in 1986, Barragan and Dimas Balbuena visited the few friends who had not fled. Then, to the sheer astonishment of these friends, they went straight to Malacañang and enlisted as volunteers for the Coalition of Writers and Artists for Freedom and Democracy (COWARD), which came out with a controversial statement of support for the embattled dictator, listing their names as signatories.

Barragan’s derring-do and infinite knowledge of Western art gradually magnetized him to the first lady’s inner circle. Much later, he became the only artist who joined the Marcos family in their exile in Hawaii. He is thought to have participated in smuggling the treasures they left behind to and from Hawaii. Nevertheless, the end of the revolution found him in the tropical paradise, carrying out more or less household duties.

The diffusion of the things in life and art

Installation View of the Exhibition at the Museum Kunstplast, Düsseldorf, DE, 1985

While Barragan had occasionally retreated to painting, he prescribed from the beginning of his artistic career the refusal to provide new material to produce new things. The first seemingly casual result he did and presented at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (SAIC) in 1964 consisted of all his possessions. For lack of photographic documentation, a rough account goes like this:

He stood in the foreground facing inward, studying what he owned. Overwritten are the words “Organisahin,” “Linisin,” “Ayusin,” terms which more or less define his artistic practice. Barragan wanted his artwork not to begin without a general overview—this was the ultimate artistic strategy. He occupied for the duration of the semester break an empty studio space outside campus and claimed that this suited him, for he was painting in a kind of “outsider position.”

He catalogued his possessions as he brought in more things from his family’s house or that had been lent to him by friends. In many later works, he states a clear message that through our possessions our “identity is formed.” He adds that “This is probably why we preserve for decades things that we never use, but keep for our identity.”

On the second step, he displayed the photographs and the catalogues. He created a total of 125 photographs, which showed his belongings ordered into categories. With the help of a complete inventory, he sorted his things depending on their importance as Z-, X-, or Y-possessions, where the Y-possessions were disposed of, thus discarded, given away, or sold; the X-possessions went to warehousing; and only the Z-possessions were intended to remain in the studio apartment.

The project is typical of what his future projects would show: an extreme entanglement of art and life. While working with his possessions he had no other places to stay. He lived and worked in his studio space. A question arose at the end of his break: how could he even walk in his studio space and make it usable again for other activities? Barragan solved the problem by packing his sculptures in crates and punching eyelets into his canvases so they could be hung without stretchers and then rolled for shipping. This interim storage had its origins in his artistic works at the SAIC.

By 1978, after refusing to be awarded the 13 Artists Award by the Cultural Center of the Philippines and after taking part in a violent protest in April of the same year in Manila, he moved to Berlin through a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) grant to research the art scene of the former GDR. After this, he settled in Belgium. By the 1980s, his family businesses had closed down, and he got by living in Europe working as a refrigerator repairman. Subsequently, the objects he used for his artworks were taken out of their artistic contexts and transferred back into daily use in Barragan’s new Brussels apartment.

The basic structure of his artistic practice had by then become fully developed. He used objects that belonged in his daily life and then, when they were transferred into the context of art, he gave them an aesthetic form. This was then documented photographically, and afterward he returned all these objects (utensils, instruments) back into the context of everyday life or as independent artifacts. Up until this time, Barragan commented that he was not sure if he ever wanted to do this kind of art. This lasted until after his first official exhibition at Charim Gallery in Vienna in 1981, but after this there were no longer any questions.

The small space where Barragan dumped all his furniture and other properties was completely transferred to the exhibition context (The Artist’s Studio, 1985, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf). The boundary between art and life is significantly visible by taking away the purposes of these objects in his private life. Even his plants were used. The piled-up furniture and everyday objects underwent auratization by the prohibition of contact in a white cube gallery, even if they were just banal things like a door or a mattress.

The complex process of idealization and de-auratization becomes clear when the refrigerator, which in the museum could not be touched, could suddenly be filled up and used again when the show ended.

Hotel works

The so-called hotel works, the first group of works that are no longer with the artist, are the best examples of the time-bound existence of his works. By refusing to create any physical sculptures, the works survived for centuries. If one were to live outside of his usual living environment, the hotel seems to be the most common option. Barragan capitalized on implicit factors of temporary nature in hotel rooms.

Barragan stayed in every hotel room for one night, temporarily owning or “expanding” his existing furniture, mattresses, blankets, and sometimes an occasional oil painting. Strictly speaking, this is the first series that involved other works of art by other artists. He photographed the sculpture he created out of these things and rebuilt everything back to the original state the next morning. Here the artist developed another characteristic of his work: its site specificity. The shape of the sculpture evolved from the local conditions. The artistic work did not begin in the studio, but within the locale of his subsequent presentation.

The Pedestals and their art

With titles like The Pedestals and their Art, Barragan declared that for his first exhibitions in museums he would resort to things that were available locally. During the work on the pedestals exhibition he attempted to answer what one can add to 2,000 years of art production yet without producing something new. He examined sculptures from the collection of Baron Albert Freyer, who was a businessman and the richest man in Belgium at that time, and built a base for each of the sculptures. The material for the base came from the area of the museum, which is not often addressed and therefore not often seen: the offices of its employees. Their tables, shelves, and lamps became temporary bases.

The intention of the artist was clear in combining the sculptures from the collection and using pedestals constructed from the furniture of the museum: the familiar sculptures were perceived in a totally different light, and the office furniture was easily transferred to the context of art. Both melted into a new aesthetic unity when the base, with its dynamics, shapes, colors, and lines, reacted to the sculptures. The base was freed by the sculpture from its serving function, and they were both constructed as equal elements.

His artistic process was deemed compromised, however, when he had to give up some of the ordinary objects in his sculptural installation when the museum bought three of the twelve works and integrated them into the collection, with instructions that they were to be jointly issued with the sculptures selected by Barragan. They were also made available to other institutions through loans.

The entanglement of art and life was abandoned at this point. By the act of purchasing, the work remained a commodity of the art world, and the boundary line between the paradigms “Art” and “Life” was finally drawn.

The use of already existing everyday materials and the survey of the everyday had been central to the concerns of the Fluxus movement (mainly in Germany). Ostracized in the 1960s and consistently turned away by the elite or declined by the market, the artists of Fluxus sold their works directly at very low prices. In 2002, for the 40th anniversary of the Fluxus movement, Barragan wrote an unpublished monograph on how the movement influenced his work and philosophy.

Again Barragan mused on the importance of place for providing his working materials. He discussed a series of sculptures by Wolf Vostell constructed from pots, TVs, and kitchen appliances from the housewares departments. Some questions from his review of the exhibition: when and why would everyday objects be considered as art? His approach in diffusing the separation between art and the everyday context accordingly became part of the characteristic of his own sculptures, as they were similarly turned back into department store shelves after the exhibition. But as with the pedestals and bases of the Freyer collection, the cycle of auratization and then again de-auratization was often interrupted by the purchase of the works.

The question of ownership and the paradigms of “Art” and “Life” turned up again at the presentation of the sculpture Discernment of Spirits (1984). Baron Albert Freyer offered to purchase the possessions of the artist, which had only yet been seen in the form of a sculpture in the spaces of what was to become the Xavier Hufkens Gallery in 1987.

This offer resulted in Barragan reconsidering what exactly were his possessions. Baron Freyer supported the functions of Barragan insofar as they were considered merely as things and not as sculptures, or as accumulated property, and strictly through a purchase agreement similarly styled to the practice of Barragan’s inventory, which determined which items should change hands. The things for daily consumption, such as toothpaste and soap, were locked out from the purchase.

Art from Art

Barragan remained faithful to his purpose of creating something new, but to work only with what already existed in his immediate surroundings. His site-specific practice soon related to works by other artists: upon invitation from the first Havana Biennale in 1984, he dealt with the sculptures already existing in the park by David Medalla, Hélio Oiticica, and Wifredo Lam. The result of this engagement became the so-called Cuban series (1983–1985). Barragan initially classified the sculptures according to size and then studied them according to the dynamics of the design language, and finally identified their relationships to each other.

This created a new ensemble, artworks from art, without Barragan making any additions. He argued that by changing our perspectives of each work, he was practically changing the works.

From playing the games of fullness and emptiness, Barragan over the years not only sustained his work from the nucleus of his possessions and his apartment building; he also had his material expenses steadily reduced. He would find himself at work feverishly before space became an issue. He had worked on empty rooms since 1993, beginning with the spaces of his San Juan studio in the suburbs of Manila.

The viewers were invited to find the traces of the artist at work from the photographs of his “empty” studio. The focus was on the furniture pedestals and the composition of the surfaces and the course of the lines.

The presence is strong in the shots of the surfaces. On closer study, one finds that the artist had made conversions and installations in the studio. The series of studio photographs, though, was no mere accumulation. Barragan explored possible answers to the question of how the character of a building changes when its purpose is changed. The series of studio photographs integrated Barragan’s 1980s project, which he realized for the Paco Railway Station before it was completely abandoned.

Obviously, the Paco Railway Station was not originally built for the presentation of art. It was, in the early 20th century, a representative reception building for the Manila North Railway Company, which was subsequently extended and embellished, for example, by a cast-iron patio, the columns of which can still be seen from the ruins.

After becoming a warehouse, the building was briefly transformed into an art gallery and aptly showed Barragan’s photographs of empty rooms in his San Juan studio. The San Juan studio, in turn, had been the offices of SCD Construction in the 1960s, which built commercial buildings whose tenants included, to name a few, British American Tobacco, a manufacturer of sports equipment, a dressmaking school, and a wholesale business for art supplies. Since 2009, Barragan successively rebuilt the rented rooms according to his needs. Thus the character of the room varied respectively through the regular architectural transformations it had undergone by its former users. Barragan presented his studio photos at Paco Railway Station on reconstructed partitions from the renovated walls built by Carlos Arguelles for the Philam Life Theater. The Philam Life Theater is now owned and soon to be demolished by SM Development and Construction. Barragan here not only connected three buildings together, he also engaged three different architectural styles and eras—the beginning, middle, and end of the 20th century.

The exhibitions recalled the different periods of time and, particularly for his “Architecture works,” many different fields, from architecture to installation to photography. They examined the lifespan of creative spaces by having the visitor enter the fragments of another artistic space, like the Paco station, which had become an architectural icon and ruin.

These excerpts from factual and fictitious rooms simultaneously connected Barragan with the illusionistic images of space in the photograph, which had a very planar, picturesque character and evoked strongly the works of Russian Constructivism, which he adored all his life. Barragan denied both the reduction of exhibition practice to a medium and the rigidity of spatial reality. By the interweaving of three different inventories, he created a confusing and sometimes elusive spatial impression.

Life After Marcos patronage

In 1989, forced to choose between a life in exile and a lackluster career back home, he opted for the latter with thoughts that he could revive his artistic career. A bold decision, considering this would separate him from his most generous patrons who had all been sidelined after the EDSA Revolution. The outbreak of the several coup d’états caught him by surprise since only a few went to his exhibitions. He was also faced with the diminishing coterie of supporters who had fewer and fewer resources to fund and collect his ever more conceptual creations. He spent most of what he earned traveling with Dimas Balbuena. During those voyages, the press released only two articles about the artistic career of Barragan, and neither referred to the specific political and social events that he had the opportunity to witness at close range. The first article was a mention of his Paco Railway Station installation work. The second was an excerpt of Barragan’s research on José Honorato Lozano. Not a word about his role during Martial Law, not a word about his exile in Hawaii. The great work that Barragan seemed destined to make never came.

He failed to mention in his memoirs that a few months before the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, he made contact with a former classmate, on the pretense of exhibiting at the well-respected Charim Galerie in Vienna; he facilitated the purchase of several Renaissance paintings at the behest of a top government official, accompanied by the steadfast Dimas Balbuena. In October 1984, Balbuena received a parcel postmarked from Havana, containing sketchbooks and a diary listing all the paintings for the unidentified patron, which he kept in custody. These documents were to constitute a part of Romero Barragan’s estate, which we are now able to examine.

He also failed to mention that during the last days of the Marcos regime, he was in Manila, holding out against the siege behind a battalion of Marcos loyalists and Presidential Guards. According to Dimas Balbuena’s diary, he was injured when a mob outside his studio attacked him on November 3, 1985, when Marcos declared a call for snap elections. On the 25th of the same month, Dimas Balbuena entrusted his remaining papers to the diplomats of the German delegation, along with a briefcase of his own manuscripts, which the Germans passed on to the Filipino ambassador in Berlin in 1988. Barragan’s papers finally reached his relatives, and in 1990 they were deposited in the archives of the UP Library. The collection was entitled We Have Nothing to Add to This World. It contained color slides of his paintings, which were all no more than five feet. Perhaps it was only the size he could photograph in his cramped apartment. The paintings, as the titles quite clearly suggest, were mostly still lifes of personal things, a kind of autobiography that had been subjected to hermetic visual codifications which rendered the paintings obscure and cryptic for any critic attempting to rediscover the arc of Barragan’s life or penetrate the mystery that would always surround his intermittent exiles, his choices, and his apparently quiet death.

Little is known about the remainder of Barragan’s work. According to some, nothing more remained, or only a few disappointing sketches. For a while there was speculation about a warehouse containing more than 500 paintings, which Barragan’s mother had burned.

In 2009, a Filipino art historian researching the media archives of Malacañang uploaded a video on YouTube of the Marcos family partying on the presidential yacht days before the EDSA Revolution, with Bongbong Marcos among friends singing We Are the World (could this song have inspired Barragan’s We Have Nothing to Add to This World paintings?). In one frame, you can clearly see Barragan, one of a number of artists invited to the occasion, in a flashing red bowtie holding a highball with nothing but water in it near the bar. The rest of the footage, 80 minutes long, shows the preparations of the Marcos family shortly before they were airlifted out to Hawaii, hastily crating and wrapping all their art collection, jewelry, and stashes of money. Among those left behind were five early paintings and two sculptures by Romero Barragan, which became part of the debris when the people broke into the Palace during the EDSA Revolution. They couldn’t really distinguish the sculptures from the litter, so they thought they had no real value. The classically styled paintings are at the far end of his spectrum of contradicting artistic production, which closely follows all the clichés that recur in the voluminous examples of the movement that he had studied in his intermittent exiles. The mimicry was so superb that a critic described them as “more Rembrandt than Rembrandt.”

Notes

1. “I have defined my sculptural materials only to my possessions and limited myself to work only with this existing equipment pool. This rigorous, conceptual limitation was a clear starting point, from which I have developed my work. This has become increasingly so over time and new possibilities have opened, but the basic approach has remained. That I do not use raw materials to form a sculpture, as would the classical sculptors do, but only the sculptural material objects that I find and thus already exist as a form in the material world. The work often arises from the situation and has always this temporary character, either because it is known from the outset only to time, as it is here in Künstlerhaus Bethanien, or because the sculptures return to their objecthood, so that only objects are left…” Barragan quoted from: Works from the Künstlerhaus Bethanien / Romero Barragan (ed.). Exh. All of This and Nothing, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 1982.

2. The author thanks Romero Barragan for an interview conducted in October 2014 and for agreeing to disclose the information included in this article.

3. There is a sort of “intermediate” between the property and the hotel works: 1974 artworks displayed at Shop 6 by Roberto Chabet and returned to Barragan’s apartment in San Juan in 2009. There he incorporated them into his lifework and photographed the interior he redesigned. See Romero Barragan. A Century of Ornament, exh.

4. Similar works were created in 1964 for his thesis. See SAIC Students Exhibition. Prologue, exh. School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1964).

5. For the reconstruction of the sculpture Discernment of Spirits, given a grant by the Fundación Jesús Soto, see Romero Barragan, Exh. Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto, 1987.

6. See Rudolf von Bülow, Romero Barragan. Paco Railway Station, 1989.

7. A sort of precursor for the project at the Paco Railway Station was a spatial intervention at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, for a show of futuristic home interiors. See Rod Paras Perez, Living in Art: Abandoned Buildings and Living Design in the Future. Exh. Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila, 1973, p. 123.

Biographical information

Romero Barragan (b. 1942 in Manila, d. 2014 San Juan)

1964 — BFA from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago
1978 — Studio Practice, Hochschule der Künste Berlin, HdK

Solo exhibitions (selection)

1989 — Last installation work at the Paco Railway Station, Manila
1987 — Memories from Highway 54, Vargas Museum, UP Diliman
1987 — Other Rooms, Other Worlds, Pinaglabanan Art Gallery, San Juan, Manila
1985 — Museum Kunstplast, Düsseldorf, DE
1984 — “Recent Work,” Charim Galerie, Vienna, Austria
1983 — Archives of a Student Revolt, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila
1981 — Hiperion, Hiraya Gallery, Manila
1980 — Selected Drawings and Paintings, Heritage Art Center, Quezon City
1976 — Plans for a Project Never to Be Realized, Sining Kamalig Art Gallery, Manila
1975 — The Pedestals and Their Art, Sining Kamalig Art Gallery, Manila

Group exhibitions (selection)

1982 — Collector’s Show, Museum of Philippine Arts, Manila
1980 — 100 Years of Philippine Painting: 1880–1980, Madurodam Museum, The Hague, Netherlands
1979 — Critic’s Choice, Ma-Yi Gallery, Mandarin Hotel Manila
1978 — Warehouses, British Council-sponsored exhibition, Spring Gardens, London, UK
1976 — 12th Grand Prix Internationale d’Art Contemporain de Monte Carlo, Museo Nacional de Monaco
1976 — Works on Paper, The Manila Hotel, Manila, Philippines
1976 — 2nd CCP Annual, Cultural Center of the Philippines
1976 — Philippine Contemporary Art, Gallery of Fine Arts, Cairo, Egypt
1973 — 12 Young Emerging Artists, Club Filipino, Manila
1972 — Drawings, Cultural Center of the Philippines

Selected Collections

• Museum of Modern Art, New York

• Kulturstiftung des Bundes, Halle an der Saale

• Kunsthaus Zürich

• Kunsthaus Stuttgart

• MOCA Grand Avenue, Los Angeles

• Collection Ringier, Zürich

• Collection Baron Albert Freyer