Miquel Barceló

The canvas as landscape

Permanent

Miquel Barceló (Felanitx, Mallorca, Spain, 1957 – Felanitx, Mallorca, Spain and Paris, France, currently)

Barceló’s birthplace on the island of Mallorca, the deserts and rivers of Africa, the beaches of Portugal, his Paris studio might be the memories of places that these works try to transport us to, but it is, in fact, to the paintings themselves, in their materiality and energy, that the artist takes us. His paintings are themselves the destinations, just as he has said, “the space between things and the picture.” A place to encounter in the present.

In reviewing three decades of Miquel Barceló’s work, one therefore realizes chronology is not of the utmost importance. The experiences and travels that have fed his creativity over time are an ever-present influence, in fact, just like his paintings, they are layered in a timeless way. And although the exhibition is non-sequential, the earliest works (Naufrage, 1984 and La Soupe, 1983) behave as bookends, the starting and ending points of the presentation, aiming to bring a sense of containment instead of trajectory within this broad timeframe of Barceló’s artistic output.

We are guided through the exhibition with excerpts of a text by Dore Ashton that she wrote for Arte Español para el Exterior, Sociedad Estatal para la Acción Cultural Exterior to accompany a retrospective of Miquel Barceló’s work, with the addition of a few other supporting references, many quoting Barceló himself. While Ashton’s impressions were informed by the paintings she saw at the time, this exhibition reverses the process, bringing some of Ashton’s words back to visual life by putting them in context with the paintings and sculptures gathered here. In our way, we also celebrate her exceptional essay and, with this presentation, bring it full circle.

«My painting is the opposite of the virtual, it is the thing itself. There is nothing hyperrealist about it. It is the paint that creates this reality. The rapport of mattersupport with the image that it presents, and no longer represents. All painting is in that space between things and the picture. It is life, and also the way of “un-dying”….’ – Interview with Marie-Laure Bernadec, Mallorca, September 1995, “Miquel Barceló”, Editions Jeu de Paume, RMN, 1996, p. 124