Miquel Barceló’s studios and notebooks offer an insight into the work of a painter now showing in Imma
I HAVE BEEN LOOKING at Miquel Barceló’s work, alert to his prodigious talent, for more than 20 years, since his show Barceló, Barcelona in 1987. I have been looking not only at his paintings but also at his face in the photographs which have appeared regularly in catalogues and in the Spanish newspapers, his aura of sandy sensuousness the gaze direct, foxy and almost innocent, the grin ironic, the pose coiled and feline.
I know that we both spent time, a lot of time, in the nightclub Zeleste beside the church of Santa Maria del Mar in Barcelona in the second half of the 1970s, but I never met him then. His side chapel in the great Gothic cathedral of Palma de Majorca is one of the new wonders of the city.
Among other things, it tells the story of the miracle of the loaves and the fishes in elaborate ceramic, with stained glass at the back the colour of squid ink.
Just as in the work in sculpture by Gaudi (who also once worked on the interior of Palma cathedral) on the façade of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, this comes in astonishing levels of unplanned detail, sometimes even in three dimensions. Fish with fierce eyes and sharp teeth float freely in the ceramic, ready to devour; they are life-size. Below them are other schools of smaller fish coming out of their watery element towards the light. And serious, slithery snakes, and wriggling octopus and creepy squid, full of tentacles; long writhing creatures of the deep. And then a black mass of shellfish.
Over to the right is the fruit, including a wonderful water melon in red and green, and bunches of purple grapes and vegetables rendered in vivid colour. There are loaves of bread piled up and ceramic jars and palm fronds.
This is a Mediterranean world of plenty, of chaotic fecundity, at times dark and frightening, especially in the lower depths as life pushes out for breathing space, as the ceramic seems to crack with the ravenous pressure of what it can not contain.
In the middle of all of this is the strange figure of Christ hovering over the tabernacle in raised ceramic which is painted white, but almost fading, slightly luminous, and quite mysterious, made in the bodily dimensions of the artist himself. There are slits in red in the feet and hands, and one in the side, but the face is not visible and there is no obvious cross. Since so much of the detail of life in the altar is almost comically rich and lifelike, each object pulling in the eye and fighting for your attention, this figure of Christ, because it is so subtly made, becomes almost breathtaking when you notice it. This is a different form of life. It is alone against the crowded world.
THIS IS A SPECIAL DAY for Miquel Barceló and his friends. It is the day of the year on which they kill a pig and, with great ceremony and much traditional skill, butcher the dead animal, cooking or preserving every available part of it. By the time I arrive at his house and studio at Farrutx on the eastern side of the island they have been eating all morning.
This all-day party is not a collection of artists or art dealers, but friends of Barceló’s from Felanitx, the village on the island where he was born, and members of his family. His accent and tone, when he speaks Catalan, is pure rural Majorcan without a hint of the years he has spent in Barcelona, New York and Paris.
Except for his fancy haircut, he could easily be a Majorcan farmer in the way he moves around the table pouring wine, or making jokes, or talking about his need now for a siesta to recover from the travails not only of the morning just spent, but of the late night before. Soon, he disappears.
His studio, which I can wander in freely now that he has gone, is like a big new factory space. It seems on the outside like a small building because it is, on one side, almost buried in the earth. In the middle of the main floor space, like a joke, there is an easel, with overalls spread out on it like a scarecrow, and, to add to the joke, there is a directors chair with the name “Masaccio” written on it. All around are buckets of paint with the name of the colour clearly marked in Spanish or French – Azul de Prussia, Azul Claro, Ocre Jaune, Vert de Chrome, Blanc, Terre Ombre Brulee.
To the north is the sea, but the studio has no sea view, just a sense of guarded sea light coming from the skylights. The view from the upper windows is of olive trees and cut stone and then the sheer rock of the mountain. The studio opens on to a terrace which has a view of a large fertile plain. All around the walls, like sentinels, stand huge stretchers facing inwards.
And then in a room to the left, as you face the window which overlooks the olive trees, there is a table with animal heads, fish heads, whitened skulls, traditional Majorcan sandals, a drum. And on the floor huge amounts of rolled canvas.
Upstairs in the mezzanine space are Miquel Barceló’s sketch books from the summer, some wonderful drawings and watercolours of fish, including a crayfish from Ibiza done in August in a pure high sea blue. On the same table are farm animals from a child’s toy farm.
And here too are toy beetles, a real goat’s skull, a flattened pig’s head, the bewildered heads of dead fish, all bone and jaw. There is a stereo with CDs, including Dylan and the Dead, Chavela Vargas, Neapolitan Songs, Milton Nascimento. The walls are painted white. There is a trolley with brushes. Some old work is bubble-wrapped and marked with titles. There is another small room which is like a laboratory with bags of pigment and a huge sink.
Close by is Barceló’s house which, downstairs, has two massive long shadowy vaulted rooms side by side. The furniture is by cool designers. On one wall hangs one of Barceló’s own magnificent bullfight paintings and, on another, one of his cauldron paintings with a red pole in real wood sticking out from it. I notice that the pantry is being filled with freshly cured ham from the morning’s killing which will season there.
When he surfaces from his siesta, we walk up to look at the half-open ceramic studio he is building. It is interesting to watch his eyes focusing sharply on the sea light below; there is a sense of him working, registering, as he gazes on the elemental colours around him, the pure rock, the stones, the washed green of the grass, the huge expanse of sea, the yellowy-white sand.
As a painter, his work has gone through many changes and shifts in emphasis. He has painted domestic interiors as much as he has painted desert light; he has dealt with the uncertainty of the delta as much as the solid interior of a library; he is as interested in capturing fierce glare as much as haze or ambiguous shadow, capturing light as something that reveals and opens up but also as something that crushes things and shrivels them.
He loves whitened bones, rock-strewn landscape, holes and crannies, craters, clotted surfaces, fading colours as much as brightness, ripeness, the brilliance of things and of people, high drama.
He loves oblique angles, flatness, the tiniest detail but he also loves the illusion of perspective, the vast scene. He is deeply playful in his creation of surfaces, but also insists that his painting is the opposite of the virtual; it is often deeply earnest; it is the thing itself; it is as much reality as anything in the natural or cultural world; it is not a game being played with paint. (On January 10th, 1991, for example, he noted in his diary: “In Paris my paintings seem more real than the streets.”)
In Paris his studio is a warren of rooms in a building in the Marais. It is clear that he has been working here more recently than in the studio in Majorca where the canvases are mainly empty, waiting for him. Here, the huge space at the centre of things is more like a factory in full production. The cement floor is spattered with paint.
Even on this dull day in November the light is clear, the room is filled with the day. Some paintings are turned into the wall. But there is one huge canvas facing outwards; it is like a desert landscape, stony, lunar, elemental, with stray objects and tiny bits of growth. It is brilliantly suggestive, amazingly tactful, as notable for what is left out as what is included. In another room there is a portrait in an old-fashioned chair of a figure with a pink scarf and bald head and glasses.
There are further cavernous rooms, and different levels and odd staircases in this warren. One room has paint and packets of colour set out in different shades, all charted. There are animal heads in another and one huge set of teeth and a line of dried lemon rind.
THERE ARE OTHER PAINTINGS in progress in some other spaces; these are full of tiny signs, like the beginnings of life, in subtle shades. They have hints of a landscape in which random things have been assembled or abandoned or flung from a height. There is a sense of shadow being played against substance, the spaces on the canvas worked on with great subtlety and beauty, much brushwork in shades of cream, blue, small bits of yellow. A green background has been lightly covered in white.
I am wandering alone in these rooms and am left in solitude to look closely at this half-done work, seeing the amount of paintwork, how many small decisions have been made, minuscule gestures of the hand with the brush, how much has been left and how much added to, greys, blacks, and then a new shape like a worm, and then a stone, and then a shadow. All this is slowly evolving into a sort of pattern.
Barceló’s sketchbooks are kept in this building, and, should his paintings ever disappear, these would be enough to secure his reputation. There are almost two hundred of them, the first from 1973 when he was 16, which includes drawings done beside algebra and geometry exercises, plus a youthful essay in longhand on the decline of the nobility.
The notebooks are carefully arranged and dated. The ones from Mali are full of brilliant images, page after page of them, figures, birds, animals, bare trees, green trees, the blue sky, the shimmering air, the baked brown earth. There are jokes such as the use of the blue Gauloises packet for the blue clothes on figures. These images, captured so quickly, are small pieces of sheer magic, delicate, often stunning as Barceló worked what is tentative against what is sure.
He allowed termites in Africa to eat the paper and then he drew around the holes they made, allowing these holes to be eyes or the crotch of a figure. There is a palpable sense of heat and torpor in the very paper itself as you turn the pages.
Even in the sketchbooks from Paris, the figures in pencil or biro, or the faces or the drawings of fruit, have an extraordinary life about them. These notebooks, which I open at random now, seem not to be preparations for anything, nor sketches for larger projects, but examples of a pure talent at work.
HE IS IN GENEVA. It is December now and the project he is working on here explains why the studio in Farrutx seems so empty of recent work and why the studio in Paris looks as though he might have escaped from it in a hurry after some frenetic activity there. He is painting the domed ceiling, 1,500sq m in surface, of Room 20, the vast Human Rights Hall at the United Nations complex. This is work on a heroic, almost comically heroic scale, involving 50,000 kilos of paint.
To work, Barceló is using huge brushes tied together, he is lying flat on a specially-built platform held up by a mass of scaffolding. He works from bins of paint, using chemists to advise about the paint, to make sure it will work, and employing someone to watch in case so much paint begins to poison him. There are huge metal tubes to clean the air. This is art on an industrial level. He seems amused by it and alert to the lunacy of it and fired with enthusiasm for what the result might be.
The work he did for the cathedral in Palma is deliberately untidy, a cornucopia of figurative images in ceramic. When he shows me his plan for this massive ceiling in Geneva, however, it is clear that he is using another aspect of his talent.
This time he is a beautiful colourist, delighting in what white and light turquoise and muted shades can do. It is like the roof of a cave in lovely dripping paint. When watched from one side, it will seem all white and pure and luminous, but when studied from another angle each large drip, painted in white on one side, will be painted in different colours on the other.
It is as though the clear night sky were to be seen from a city and then from a ship. On the second viewing, the stars emerge in the sky as though they were hidden the first time you looked.
Because of the scale of this venture, the sheer size of the vaulted ceiling, this will have a breath-taking effect, seem like a trick, as though different lights came on as you cross the hall.
This is an edited version of Colm Tóibín’s essay that appears in the catalogue for the exhibition. Miquel Barceló: The African Work is exhibiting at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Kilmainham, until Sept 28