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Barrios’ work unfolds within a territory shaped by grand mythologies, syncretisms, and fables. His practice brings together elements ranging from Mesoamerican mysticism and Victorian botanical illustration to traditional Japanese painting, interweaving reality with fantasy and historical chronicle with personal anecdote, with drawing serving as its structural backbone.

Through complex narrative constructions, Javier Barrios’ work is populated by characters who grapple with humanity’s confrontation with the forces that govern its destiny: beauty and horror, life and death, nature and the psyche. These forces are often embodied in beings that transition between flower, animal, human, and deity—paradigmatic entities that give form to profound existential tensions.

His drawings, paintings, watercolors, and sculptures inhabit a universe that extends from intimate works on manila paper to large-scale stagings on folding screens and monumental oil paintings. From a historiographic perspective, his practice draws upon elements tied to the great discoveries that ushered in contemporary globalization from the fifteenth century onward, the extraordinary sense of wonder experienced by the chroniclers who documented them, and the communion that exists between human beings and the worlds that surround and contain them.

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