(Louisiana, 1947)

He studied Fine Arts in Canada, the United States, and Venezuela. As a sculptor, for the past fifty years he has been dedicated to inquiry on perceptual relations and their connection to the artwork, mainly through illusionist methods that suggest instability in all sorts of forms. His work is not limited to individual interaction, but has also expanded towards the public sphere by means of sculptures for buildings and urban environments. The element of massive display produces new dimensions for the instability of sculptural form, modifying its surroundings and suggesting that the certainty with which we look at the city is in itself an illusion.

Virtuality is a key theme in his work, inasmuch as perception, before objects, articulates spaces where there are none, completes perspective where it is broken apart, or finds itself within the possibility of sheer incomprehension of the form. This is how Barrios’ art generates questions, from the point of view of abstraction, about how we see, how we perceive, and how trained our gaze is by a history of art that is not as fixed as it might seem at first.

Rafael Barrios currently lives and works in USA.