Miquel Barceló

Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich
José-Maria Cano, London
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art, 9 December 1999, Lot 23
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Like many great artists throughout history, Miquel Barceló’s thirst for visual experience has taken him around the globe in an ongoing cultural adventure - one whose stark opposites have often been dramatically juxtaposed in the works inspired by each place. In January 1988, seeking a complete break from the Western artistic vein in which his work had been channelled both in and against so far, Barceló made his first, life-changing trip to Mali in Africa. There, against the dramatic backdrop of the African wilderness, the white light that had been gradually creeping into his paintings suddenly made absolute sense. Barceló explained that it was the distinctive, arid light in particular that enchanted him: “The light in the desert is so intense that things disappear, and the shadows are more intense than the things themselves. What isn’t has more intensity than what is. Because in Africa, light isn’t colour. Light is much stronger than colour. Colour is almost corroded by the light.” (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Miquel Barceló: Obra sobre Papel 1979-1999, 1999, p. iv)

Drawn to Africa initially by an attraction of the unknown, Barceló’s voyage there importantly brought an end to the repetition and conformity that had been gradually creeping into his work. However, instead of seeking to replace his existing cultural legacy, Barceló set about re-examining the roles of art and of the artist; to try to reconnect with the deeper origins of art and its relationship to life. The consequences of this experience were explosive and on returning to Europe, Barceló produced what is widely regarded as the most powerful and evocative paitings of his career. As if refracted through a shimmering haze of intense Saharan light and heat, Barceló here casts our eye over a vast panoramic terrain in which the only forms of life - the Olivas Negras - have become like a herd of ant-like specks. Dwarfed by the monumentality, relentless glare and awesome expanse of their dreamlike, lunar landscape, the already impressive sense of scale of the canvas here is dramatically heightened by our own God’s-eye perspective which gazes down upon their scattered, tiny forms. Lost within this part arid desert, part glacial landscape, it is the ambiguity of our own relationship to the composition – and more importantly the elements contained within it - that so powerfully embodies the cyclical organicism of life and the epic scale and dimension of the human adventure.

Barceló here refines his previous obsessions with the organicity and materiality of the creative act to incorporate the pulsing rhythms of time and life themselves. Purged of the colour and explicit cultural and autobiographical references which had articulated his earlier paintings, Barceló charges these groundbreaking off-white compositions with an open-ended suggestion and ambiguity. Unlike his first still life canvases which were saturated with the dense and brutal materials of their making, these ethereal white canvases are governed by an altogether more compelling calmness and sense of scale. As if gazing down upon the monumental drama of nature, they voice Barceló’s increasingly reflective range of critical and spiritual questions through the sublime, dazzling intensity of a vision. Most of all, they give poetic expression to the universal, existential conflict between what endures and what changes.

Barceló’s early work had frequently referred to the life giving powers of eating and drinking and his trip to Africa allowed him to see and express this relationship with a greater metaphysical directness. The daily struggle for survival he encountered there had a huge impact upon how he viewed life, art and materials; about how closely they are related and how universally interdependent they are.  This is directly referred to in Olivas Negras which incorporates an array of organic matter into its surface. Filled with bursting, organic impasto, the almost topographical accumulation of the landscape has an existential edge that celebrates the material evolution of the painting through the intervention of the artist.

Oscillating between homage and rejection of the rich cultural legacy in which he grew up, Barceló here invigorates the Spanish tradition of still-life painting with the essential vitality and visceral intensity of existence. Like his series of paintings inspired by the action of the glaciers on the land, Barceló’s layered application of paint and other media to the canvas here reveals an evolutionary process of constant compositional ‘re-working’. Although thematically categorised as a still life, it is the geographical landscape of Olivas Negras that gives it its great theatrical presence. By incorporating actual still life objects into the scattered landscape of the composition, Barceló fuses these two traditions to bridge the gap between the reality of our own experience and the illusory reality of the canvas. Centred around an exploration of the major issues and technical problems of classical painting – perspective, composition, treatment of light – Barceló’s tenacious painterly impulse here creates something much more real and intense than precedents to which it refers. “I don’t have a destructive spirit,” Barceló explained, “I’m just stirring things up….What interests me in still life is to work with it as organic material, to feel it as pure material… to create a kind of dance inside the picture.” (the artist cited in: Kevin Power, Conversations with Miquel Barceló (et al.), Alicante, 1985)