Miquel Barceló in the Spanish Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale
This exhibition overviews the last ten years of Barceló’s work with a special focus on his recent production, comprising about twenty mostly large-format paintings and a selection of work in ceramic.
The most recent works come from the same time as when the artist was painting the gigantic dome at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva. Barceló placed a number of canvases on the floor, which were randomly covered by the paint dripping from the ceiling. He then used these canvases as backgrounds on which to paint. The new pieces address three major subjects: primates, African landscapes and sea foam.
The first series consists of paintings of solitary gorillas, tying in with earlier works from the late 1990s depicting Snowflake, the albino gorilla captured by Spanish scientists in Equatorial Guinea who spent the rest of his life in the Barcelona Zoo. Snowflake was a true local celebrity and a tourist attraction in Barcelona. For Barceló, these paintings are to some extent self-portraits reflecting the solitude of the artist and somehow also alluding to the figure of the painter as an endangered species in an era dominated by new technological media.
The new African landscapes speak to earlier works from the mid 1990s and other small canvases from the present decade. They depict human figures, domestic animals, objects and vegetation and, in one case, life on the banks of the Niger River with fishermen and canoes. The images seem to appear and disappear in a sea of paint, in turn standing in as a metaphor of the vast expanse of the semi-desert landscape of Mali, whether on the banks of the Niger River, or the escarpments of the dispersed settlements in Dogon Country where the artist has a studio. Since 1988, Barceló spends regular periods of time in Mali.
The third group of works consists of white paintings representing the foam of sea waves in a virtually abstract manner. These new images are directly related with some of Barceló’s early conceptual works from the late 1970s when he explored the behaviour of pigments and matter. These new paintings are charged with great expressiveness in the contrast of a liquid subject in constant motion, the sea, with a purely material and static image.
The exhibition also contains a selection of works from 1999, including other sea paintings, though never rendering it in a merely representational fashion, for the images are suggested in the behaviour of the material. In these paintings, image and background are one and the same. Also on show are works from the middle of the current decade, in which Barceló uses almost exclusively black and white in paintings verging towards abstraction. The images in these works are undercut by a kind of apocalyptic sensation not unlike an oil spill. They sometimes show barely glimpsed images of fossils and molluscs. Finally, there are other works from 2006 and 2007, depicting white desert landscapes.
The exhibition also showcases a group of ceramics, a medium central to Barceló’s work since the mid-nineties, reaching its zenith in his murals for St. Peter’s Chapel in the Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca.
The exhibition also features a screening of “Paso Doble,” the performance originally produced for the Avignon Festival which will be performed live during the opening days of the Biennale. This work was made in collaboration with the choreographer Josef Nadji.
Finally, the exhibition presents a series of works by the French artist and writer François Augiéras (1925 – 1971), whose oeuvre Barceló wishes to bring to a larger public. Augiéras’ literature has mostly been published in small and posthumous recent editions, although it already received high praise in the past from authors including André Guide or Marguerite Yourcenar. Augiéras lived for periods of time in Mali, Algeria and Mauritania. His writing touches on mystical subject matters, the African experience and an explicit eroticism, with a lyrical albeit violent style. Augiéras was also a painter of small works, rendering images of characters, canoes, landscapes and animals in a sort of timeless style remitting to Orthodox icons or the Italian Primitives.