The combustion of Miquel Barceló's workshop

The enigmatic image that heads this article is modest and discreet like a silent question in the shape of a bird, but the majority of the photos that Jean Marie del Moral has taken over several decades around the universe of Miquel Barceló are quite the opposite. : great intimate and chatty frescoes whether you focus on a portrait or capture the labyrinth of an inscrutable workshop, or capture the painter surrounded by water on all sides somewhere in Africa.

The quality of the 24 photographs that can be seen at the EL PAÍS

stand

in Arco begins with the hypnotic attention they provoke, regardless of the object captured, because in all of them the admiration and restraint of someone who avoids conditioning the scene exudes.

Miquel Barceló portrayed in his Paris studio in 2010.Jean Marie del Moral

Barceló himself has told it: Jean Marie del Moral has not been in his life for years and in his many workshops—in Mallorca, in Paris, in Mali—in photos that are offered as settings for the spectator's prying imagination and theaters of an art that is before anything else artisanal and physical manufacture: the very repainted paint cans, the brushes, the clay or clay figures being made or unmade, the improbable and capricious objects - a pair of scissors, the cut out EL PAÍS masthead and the tests to illustrate again the Letters to the Director section.

Del Moral recreates intimate life from a physical distance and involves the viewer in the secret place of the workshop as womb and placenta, as a space of unpredictable and incontinent gestation.

It is true that many times the shots are taken from very far away and without Barceló even knowing that he is being photographed while the brush traces its path across the surface of the canvas or squatting down examines the work lying on the floor.

There it is not Barceló who is absorbed in work, but Del Moral himself.

The quality of the 24 photographs on display begins with the hypnotic attention they provoke, whatever the object captured.

But perhaps where the photographer illuminates a more decidedly hypnotic effect is in the intensity of a look that is not in the person looking at the camera -Miquel Barceló-, but in the photographic lens that captures and condenses it, pushes it to be fully and, properly, invents it.

This happens with some of the portraits that Jean Marie del Moral has dedicated to Barceló, almost always with the same hallucinated imminence, with the genuine innocence of the game of creation and the imperative impulse of the child who has not let Barceló die.

In so many of those portraits of the adult appears the boy who at the age of 14 already knew that he would be a painter, but he spent almost every day at sea on a dilapidated wooden boat that he inherited at that time, and from there he still comes furious and unmistakable a unique smell.

When he accepted the commission in Geneva to paint the dome of the UN Human Rights Chamber he took his painter's supplies, but he also took a handful of seaweed from the sea of ​​Mallorca in a jar.

Those algae stay stuck to the base of the boat and rot as they rotted in Geneva to the horror of the friends who smelled them.

It was the improvised variant of another ancestral smell, that “kind of noble putrefaction” that comes from the mixture of filtered sea water in the old wooden boat, rotten squid, remains of bait and diesel from the engine.

3D recreation of the EL PAÍS Feria Arco 2024 'stand': Miquel Barceló by Jean Marie del Moral.

Barceló tells all of this in a beautiful book recently published in France by Mercure de France, titled with a verse by Góngora:

De la vida mia

, and for the collection

Traits et portraits

.

The graphic display of his personal notebooks—written, drawn, painted—is combined with the story of biographical episodes that go back to the childhood of a boy from the sea and the streets, and the obstinacy of reading as a vital pump as crucial as reading itself. paint.

There he reproduces the piece of paper that records the names of his favorite authors, from Cervantes to Teresa de Jesús, passing through Pessoa, Lautréamont and Borges, but also the disturbing sample of the species of fish from Mallorca with their names and shapes. …

Del Moral has photographed a hallucinated Barceló, an abstracted Barceló with the brush in his hand, a Barceló resting on the enormous dome of the Mercat de les Flors and a Barceló applied on a gigantic work table populated with large sheets where he reigns. him, as queen in the rest of a workshop that is lived between organic brutalism and the subtlety of the discovery.

That is perhaps the virtuosity of photographs that capture the dirty and smudged crudeness of the work in progress in the workshop saturated with odds and ends: goat skulls, threadbare tunics, rusty tongs, hanging ropes, human and animal skeletons, stuffed birds, bricks work… and the cell phone on the table or the wireless headphones in your ears.

The photographer Jean Marie del Moral in his house in Les Salines, in Mallorca.Sofía Moro

Nothing is inert in those intimate spaces, so often stitched with self-portraits, remains of marine caves and thickness of erosion and saltpeter.

You can almost see in the photographs the route of the connections between the glass case full of shells and marine fossils and the painting or sculpture in which they will end up after passing through the hands of the artist, which is the only thing that almost never appears in the photographs. photographs by Jean Marie del Moral: the hands that crush, twist, crack, spread or tear the canvas, clay or stone of an intimate universe in combustion.

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