Born in 1919 in Torre de Miguel Sesmero in the province of Badajoz to a family of farm workers, Barjola moved to the city of Badajoz in 1934 to attend the School of Arts and Crafts. The tragic events of the Spanish Civil War during his adolescence left a lasting mark on Barjola, whose future work partly echoed his experiences during that period. In 1943, he moved to Madrid to continue his education. He enrolled at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts – where he attended only classes in wood carving and engraving – and also followed classes at the Círculo de Bellas Artes (Fine Arts Circle) and frequented the Museum of Artistic Reproductions and the Prado Museum, where he made copies of Velázquez’s Buffoon collection and produced works interpreting paintings by Goya, El Greco and Hieronymus Bosch. He completed his first engravings and earned a living as an official sculptor in the Granda workshops. Barjola’s work from the late 1940s depicts traditional scenes and characters from the urban periphery, displaying a naturalism already incorporating certain traits of expressionism.
In 1950, he decided to devote himself fully to painting and in 1957, he held his first individual exhibition in the Galería Abril in Madrid, limiting his subject matter to the human figure. In his own words: ‘I entered a more mental cycle, in which cubism is synchronised with the expressionism I never left behind’. That same year, he sojourned for three months in Belgium, where the works of Ensor made a significant impression on him; he then travelled to Paris where he was struck by the work of Matisse, Soutine, Rouault and de Staël. He held an individual exhibition in the Galerie du Théâtre in Brussels and participated in a collective exhibition in Galerie Vallovra in the same city.
In 1959, his style shifted somewhat towards abstraction and an untempered chromaticism in which the eponymous objects or human figures of his works are recognisable. These figures –consisting of large patches or blotches in a restricted colour palate – are reduced to their essential contours. The artist himself commented on what this shift meant in his work: ‘Tired of this symbiosis, I entered an abstractionist period from which I drew conclusions which allowed me to see space clearly. This phase was short-lived as I was always interested in the content. Logically, this had to be so, since abstract art is only aesthetic.’
In 1960, he was awarded a bursary prize from the Juan March Foundation to further pursue his studies abroad. As of 1964, his painting became highly expressive; the sketching and brushwork served to highlight the monstrosity and sordid nature of his subjects and characters. He started enriching colours using highly contrasting black, carmine and green, bringing shapes into relief by using angular and irregular outlines. A certain surrealistic component emerged in his paintings, with figures displaying deformations, especially in their hands and heads.
Starting in 1967, he abandoned coarse impastos, preferring flatter tints of violent tones, bringing him closer in certain respects to pop art. In this period, some attitudes and features which are constants in his corpus became even more apparent: irony, sarcasm, ugliness, vulgarity, sinisterness. In the 1970s, Barjola’s work once again took on expressionist features, drawing on informalism and the work of Bacon, de Kooning and Picasso. Some of his works from the beginning of this decade contain social and political criticism, depicting scenes of death and collective violence such as shootings and massacres – denouncing the existence of oppressive regimes – arranged in a broader pictorial space than in his previous work.
