Trained at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá, Barreiro conceives drawing as a continuous, almost obsessive exercise. His practice draws from an uninterrupted flow of images, cinematic fragments, nocturnal scenes observed from his immediate surroundings, mental landscapes, and motifs drawn from everyday life-which he captures, slows down, and transforms. Drawing never appears as an isolated gesture, but rather as a process in constant mutation. Working primarily with oil pastel and colored pencil, he constructs his images through successive layers, correcting, erasing, and reworking them.

This economy of gesture makes visible the temporality of drawing-its hesitations, repetitions, and insistences, and situates each work within an open dynamic, closer to an ongoing search than to the fixation of a definitive form. His iconographic universe is marked by persistent tensions. Human, animal, or spectral figures inhabit unstable spaces, suspended between gravity and weightlessness, between appearance and disappearance. Boxers, volcanoes, floating bodies, and coffins form a vocabulary that is at once intimate and symbolic, where violence and tenderness, materiality and mysticism coexist.

The image thus becomes a site of ambivalence, a surface where opposing forces remain unresolved. This ambivalence constitutes the core of his practice. Drawing operates as a tool for thinking, a space in which vision is constructed over time, where the image, extracted from a continuous, often cinematic flow-is suspended and reconfigured. In contrast to the speed of moving images, Barreiro proposes a slowed temporality, inviting the viewer to navigate, reconstruct, and inhabit the scene.

Since the early 2010s, his work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Colombia and internationally. He has exhibited primarily in Bogotá, at SGR Galería, Galería 12:00, and Desborde Galería, as well as in Caracas at Hacienda Trinidad and in Cali at Lugar a Dudas. More recently, he presented the solo exhibition Ambivalenteat Casa Hoffmann, Bogotá, in 2025, and participated in the group exhibition Puro horizonte alrededor at Policroma, Medellín, in 2026, further establishing his presence within a rapidly evolving Colombian contemporary scene. His work has been shown in both institutional and independent contexts, including the Salón de Arte Joven Colsanitas at Galería Nueveochenta and Artecámara at ARTBO.

He has also participated in residencies such as Lugar a Dudas in Cali and El Avispero in Caracas. His work is part of the collections of the Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá.