Barceló and ceramics as an excessive type of portray: “As if you made frescoes without needing the building or the architect” | Culture | EUROtoday

John Keats was 22 years previous when he wrote the poem that, not directly, provides its identify to this exhibition, Ode to a Greek urn. From the perfection and permanence of marble, he evoked the transience of life with out understanding that his would solely final three extra years. From that urn he obtained a lesson: magnificence is reality and reality is magnificence, which might lead his good friend PB Shelley to pronounce the phrase: “We are all Greeks.” That is the title of the exhibition that brings collectively 30 years of ceramics by Miquel Barceló. With these works, the artist from Felanitx (Mallorca, 1957) turns the 1819 poem on its head and celebrates the transience of ceramics that stay, however are additionally recycled and reused. Maybe that's why I name her “the mother of painting.” Amplified portray.”

“Ceramics are an extreme form of painting. As if you made frescoes without needing either the building or the architect. It has extreme modernity,” he maintains. She defends that it has allowed him to make a leap “from the Neolithic to the 21st century.” Or what’s the similar: from the skulls that he amassed in Mali (Pinocchio cranium1995) till Doric-Aztec totem (2019) that immediately builds by making bricks and stacking Ionic capitals, Aztec snakes or Chinese dragons, together with all of the fish (Head of Morena1999) that he designed for his Sant Pere chapel within the Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca, the years wherein he had a really lengthy dialog with Gaudí and Jujol.

Although it’s true that in lots of canvases, just like the one which opens the exhibition –Apology of the glass (1987) – the amphorae and three dimensions have been already current, as if he have been portray bottomless containers. The curator of this exhibition, Enrique Juncosa, dates his curiosity in ceramics to considered one of his first journeys to Mali. It was 1994. The painter had been touring by Africa for six years since, in 1988, he and his good friend Javier Mariscal loaded a Land Rover with portray supplies and arrived in Gao, in Mali, the place they rented a home. Barceló returned many occasions. And, within the nation of the Dogon, he started to color arid landscapes. It was the land. And ceramics would quickly arrive “simply because the sand storms did not allow painting,” Juncosa factors out.

The conventional strategy of the realm mixes clay with animal excrement. That is why the works are fragile and, in contrast to what occurs in different cultures, ceramics crumble and disappear. That's atypical. “Being fragile, ceramics are also survivors because no one gives them value,” says Barceló. He refers to the truth that when nations are destroyed or cultures are tried to be destroyed, palaces are burned, however nobody touches the ceramics as a result of they don’t worth them. “That is why she is the guardian of memory.” He considers himself an artist who appears again. “Since he was young. It is the same as looking forward.” He thus remembers, solely now, a visit by Extremadura and Andalusia along with his first girlfriend, who was 17 years previous and a ceramist. They adopted the e-book by Llorens Artigas Spanish common ceramics, “then I wasn't interested in anything. But she has returned to me.”

“Ceramic is a sensitive material that receives a caress as well as a host.” Firewood-fired clay maintains reminiscence: “I know what I did in winter because it has remains of my sweaters.” It additionally comprises probability. Some of his exhibited items illustrate that concept. Anguilla, from 2007, exhibits the coincidence that brought on the vessel to fold in on itself and alter form when the painter fell on it earlier than firing.

“The relationship with ceramics is physical. “You work with the body,” she explains. “If the pieces are big, you run out.” He succeeded him within the cathedral of Mallorca, filling its chapel with fish. But additionally in Avignon, when the theater competition commissioned him to carry out Two-step (2006) wherein, choreographed by Serbian Joesf Nadj, they labored the clay with their our bodies. “We ended up exhausted.” A movie about that work exhibits how Barceló added his physique to the instruments with which he helps himself when he paints: “I don't despise any of them. I use farming implements and gardener's rakes, tools of dentists and surgeons, of hairdressers and butchers: knife, scratch, scratch, scratch and, when I make ceramics, I work with both my hands and my elbow, because it allows wider movements.

Between Paris and Mallorca, his latest ceramic works – which can be seen in La Pedrera until June 30 – are colored, monochrome amphorae and colorful fruits. Four apples and a knife (2022) that give a good account of Barceló's journey through the mud and around the world. All in all, two works summarize his world of tireless discovery. One is in the shape of a turbot and is a project for a giant ceramic floor where you can step on the scales without knowing that you are walking on a fish. The other, from 2006, is the most indefinite piece in this exhibition: a pile of chopped, punctured and stacked bricks. It has two holes “like skulls.” It is a self-portrait – “in which I have poked, hit and punched myself” –. He has referred to as him Egomacro. And she doesn't have eyes, however she does have hair.