Secondary Market
Rafael Barrios
Venezuelan, born 1947
Rafael Barrios (born 1947) is a Venezuelan sculptor based between Miami and Caracas. His lacquered steel sculptures are made of flat planes that the eye reads as solid volumes, so that his stacked, tilting forms seem to levitate and shift as the viewer walks around them.
Biography
Rafael Barrios was born in 1947 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Venezuelan parents, and grew up in Venezuela, where he took his first art classes at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas. He graduated from the Ontario College of Art in Toronto in 1973 and later pursued graduate studies at New York University. He lives and works between Miami and Caracas.
Virtual volumes
Barrios belongs to the Venezuelan lineage of optical and kinetic art, but his true material is perception. His sculptures are cut from flat sheets of steel and finished in hand-applied lacquer; seen from the right angle, each plane reads as a solid block. Stacked off balance, the blocks appear to float and slide against gravity, and the illusion changes with every step the viewer takes. Barrios calls this approach “Virtualism”. Opalescent lacquers and micro-perforated surfaces add a further play of light.
Public monuments
Many of his compositions first took shape at monumental scale. Apocalipsis levitante was installed in 1980 at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Sofía Imber in Caracas, and Vertical dislocado en tres tiempos in 1994 for the government of Miranda State. Levitación I (1985) stands at the Plaza Sucre metro station in Caracas and Tercer Horizonte (1992) in Palos de la Frontera, Spain, for the fifth centenary of Columbus’s voyage. In 2012 nine of his monumental sculptures lined Park Avenue in New York, and in 2013 Obtusa was unveiled in Reykjavík.
In Miami
South Florida holds a concentration of his work: Levitation at the Murano Grande building in Miami Beach (2003), Rising Horizons in Sunny Isles (2006) and Pause, installed in front of Coral Gables City Hall in 2019. The same year the Coral Gables Museum presented Ontological Curiosity, a survey of more than twenty works. In Europe he has shown with Galerie Rauchfeld in Paris and with Bel Air Fine Art, which devoted Virtual Levitations to him in Saint-Tropez in 2014.