La liberté me semble un mythe (2019) Painting by Walter Barrientos

Walter Barrientos was born on July 11, 1960 in Cuzco, Peru.

He currently lives and works in Toulouse.

Originally from Peru, Walter Barrientos is today an internationally recognized painter. Based in Toulouse since 2001, he is characterized by a colorful figurative and narrative painting translating an incessant back and forth between past and future. He develops a universe that is both dreamlike and chaotic, populated by human and animal figures where his personal history irremediably intersects with that of the Andean world.

He defines himself above all by a reappropriation of collective myths that he expresses through the medium of painting that he practices as an autodidact. He learned this practice as he learned to live: in complete freedom.

"As an engraver, I thought I was dead", the future of a technique considered too old seemed blocked."I painted for a while because engravings were growing inside me. I had to let them sleep. And I wake them up today as if after a long sleep. The return to engraving is the fruit of a long wait. In the darkness of this silence, the constant back and forth between my past world and my current world welled up in me. The journey between yesterday and today was a dormant expectation. Engraving slumbered there. I hoped for a bridge, a path, a passage between two worlds, that of my origins steeped in earth and vegetation and that of today steeped in culture and knowledge. A silent gestation was operating. I gave birth to a path back. By engraving again, I return to an exploration abandoned more than fifteen years ago in Peru. I find the gestures, not of the artist but of the worker of the earth: I start furrows, I uproot, I weed, I form mounds and drains, I sort the good and the bad weeds". Walter Barrientos

• Nationality: FRANCE
• Date of birth : 1960
• Artistic domains: Represented by a Gallery,
• Groups: Contemporary French Artists Artists presented by a gallery