Barceló and ceramics as an extreme form of painting: “As if you made frescoes without needing the building or the architect”

John Keats was 22 years old when he wrote the poem that indirectly gives its name to this exhibition,

Ode on a Grecian Urn

.

From the perfection and permanence of marble, he evoked the transience of life without knowing that his would only last three more years.

From that urn he obtained a lesson: beauty is truth and truth is beauty, which would lead his friend PB Shelley to pronounce the phrase: “We are all Greeks.”

That is the title of the exhibition that brings together 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 remain, but are also recycled and reused.

Maybe that's why I call her “the mother of painting.”

Amplified painting.”

“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 is the same: from the skulls that he amassed in Mali (

Pinocchio Skull

, 1995) to the

Doric-Aztec Totem

(2019) that he builds today by manufacturing bricks and stacking Ionic capitals, Aztec snakes or Chinese dragons, passing through all the fish (

Cap de Morena

, 1999) that he designed for his Sant Pere chapel in the Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca, the years in which he had a very long conversation with Gaudí and Jujol.”

More information

Mallorca, planet Barceló

Although it is true that in many canvases, such as the one that opens the exhibition -

Apologia del vidre

(1987) - the amphorae and three dimensions were already present, as if he were painting bottomless containers, the curator of this exhibition, Enrique Juncosa, dates back to One of his first trips to Mali sparked his interest in ceramics.

It was 1994. The painter had been traveling through Africa for six years since, in 1988, he and his friend Javier Mariscal loaded a Land Rover with painting materials and arrived in Gao, in Mali, where they rented a house.

Barceló returned many times.

And, in the country of the Dogon, he began to paint arid landscapes.

It was the land.

And ceramics would soon arrive “simply because the sand storms did not allow painting,” Juncosa points out.

The work 'Peix Blau' (1998), which is part of the exhibition.Pau Fabregat

The traditional technique of the area mixes clay with animal excrement.

That is why the works are fragile and, unlike what happens in other 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 fact that when countries are destroyed or cultures are tried to be destroyed, palaces are burned, but no one touches the ceramics because they do not value it.

“That is why she is the guardian of memory.”

He considers himself an artist who looks back.

“Since he was young.

It is the same as looking forward.”

He thus remembers, only now, a trip through Extremadura and Andalusia with his first girlfriend, who was 17 years old and a ceramist.

They followed Llorens Artigas' book

Spanish Popular Ceramics

, “so I wasn't interested in anything.

But it has come back to me.”

“Ceramic is a sensitive material that receives a caress as well as a host.”

Firewood-fired clay maintains memory: “I know what I did in winter because it has remains of my sweaters.”

It also contains chance.

Some of his exhibited pieces illustrate that idea.

Anguilla, from 2007, shows the coincidence that caused the vessel to fold in on itself and change shape when the painter fell on it before firing.

The piece 'Poulpe À L'envers' (2001).Pau Fabregat

“The relationship with ceramics is physical.

“You work with the body,” she explains.

“If the pieces are big, you run out.”

He succeeded him in the cathedral of Mallorca, filling its chapel with fish.

But also in Avignon, when the theater festival commissioned the performance

Paso Doble

(2006) in which, choreographed by the Serbian Joesf Nadj, they worked the clay with their bodies.

“We ended up exhausted.”

A film about that work shows how Barceló added his body to the tools 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.

The ceramics 'Amassagou', 'Amo' and 'Domo'.Pau Fabregat

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

Quatre pommes et un couteau

(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 called it

Egomacro

.

And he doesn't have eyes, but he does have hair.