“Painting is something that stains: in adolescence I realised that is was something inevitably dirty.” MIQUEL BARCELÓ
“I like the phenomenology of painting to look like nature.” MIQUEL BARCELÓ
Miquel Barceló’s work is about materials, about ‘matter’, and Sinonimies, painted in 2004, is a spectacular example of the Mallorcan artist’s technique. The thick impasto and layering of paint are typical of his work and form his key subject. It has been a presence for him since childhood: “The backpack I would take to school was always full of bird dung, of shit collected from everywhere,” he has recalled, “I realized right away that I couldn’t even use a pen without making a mess and getting stains all over me. Real painting is something that stains: in adolescence I realised that it was something inevitably dirty” (Miquel Barceló in an interview with Ramón F. Reboiras, El Independiente, 26 January 1990). Influenced by fellow Catalan artists such as Antoni Tàpies and Joan Miró, Barceló continues to paint in the tradition of Catalan art while making it his own. In his work, Barceló continues the tradition of gestural painting of Art Informel and, like Tàpies in his Great Painting from 1958, uses abundant
texture to create a vibrant, contemplative composition that references the reality and acts as an object of meditation.
The physicality of painting allows the viewer to step into the landscape in front of them. The painterly and richly textured Sinonimies depicts fruits abstracted against a white and red background. Such images of the land and the nature and culture of the artist’s homeland have been common in his work since his first trip to Africa in 1988. He found his trip inspirational and the African landscape became a key element and motivation in his work: “[Africa represents] a kind of overall cleansing. The first reaction
Ialways have when I arrive in Mali is to realise the uselessness of things. One paints out of pure necessity there. In Paris or here [in Mallorca], by always painting in the same studio, you come to forget the essence of the affair. In Mali I get back in touch with the essence of the act of painting”’ (Miquel Barceló, interview with M. F. Sánchez, La Esfera, no. 10, March 1992, in Miquel Barceló: 1987–1997, exh. cat., Museu d’Art Contemporani deBarcelona, 1998, p. 19).
Barceló employs a physical, impulsive process of painting that involves vigorous brushwork, and the pouring and dripping of paint: “It is the materials that give an image and not the reverse” (Miquel Barceló quoted in Eric Mezil ed., Terramare: Miquel Barceló, Collection Lambert en Avignon, 2010, p.221). Sinonimies is a superb example of this process and of how materials are the very substance and inspiration of Barceló’s work – and how matter is key to creating spiritually profound images.