How We Slowly Turn Into Strangers | Renato Barja, Jr.

Among his contemporaries, nobody portrays desolation quite like Renato Barja, Jr. His is a vision that is both brooding and unexpected—an idiosyncratic take on melancholia that invites us to partake within one’s personal sentiment, as well as in his profound imagination. Empathy resides at the center of Barja’s works. As an artist whose eye is trained into his immediate surroundings, his images, objects, and characters are reflections of the struggles of his own time. And such was during a time of grave isolation—a byproduct of lockdowns and confinement during the past three years.

In one of those rare opportunities to see the world outside during quarantine, he saw a man sitting in an open field, as if waiting or wondering, or both. This man sits on top of a barricade, which became the inspiration for one of his paintings, and became the symbol for his own personal understanding of a kind of struggle rooted in uncertainty and isolation.