Almost half a century ago, in May 1975, a young Miquel Barceló settled in Barcelona from his native Felanitx to study at the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts. He was in the city for a semester, left and then returned to live between 1978 and 1982. Yesterday, Barceló presented at the Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera, in the smell of a crowd, the exhibition We are all Greeks, dedicated to his ceramics. We spoke with him, sitting at one of the tables where his vessels are displayed.
You have starred in several large-format exhibitions in Barcelona: at the Casa de la Caritat in 1988, the Macba in 1998, CaixaForum and Center Santa Mònica in 2010... Fifteen years after the last ones, what does this return represent to you?
I still consider Barcelona my city, even though I don't live there, and I actually come here quite a bit, to work in Joan Roma's engraving workshop and for the books I make with the editor Joan Tarrida. I have always liked that masculine-feminine dialectic, Barceló-Barcelona (that's what the 1988 exhibition was titled). The La Pedrera exhibition is a way to show my work through ceramics; We propose a kind of 40-year retrospective.
What has changed from the Barceló of 1975 to that of 2024?
I have a more global view, of course. But my feeling currently is not to recapitulate but to try every day something that I have not done before, that gives meaning to all the previous work. Now I am much freer to decide every morning if I am going to start painting, writing or making ceramics. But the urgency to work has not changed. I am building a very large workshop in Mallorca, I think it will be the definitive one, because I know that I need a lot more space, and if a piece doesn't turn out well, it goes to the warehouse. A while ago I ordered a library for my notebooks, I keep them all and I have more than 300. I realized that there is only one meter of free space left and I have asked them to expand it for the ones I plan to fill in the future. Time worries me, it has always been present in my work, and in the catalog of this exhibition I show a very complete graphic chronology of the places where I have lived, the works and projects I have done, the artists who have influenced me, the books what I have read...
In an era where art has been deprived of an urban imprint, his has always been closely linked to nature and large spaces. In La Pedrera you can see all kinds of pieces of fish, octopuses, goats, donkeys, fruits... This connects it with the increasingly widespread environmental concern.
I see the environment getting worse and worse, now it is an urgent concern, an agonizing issue. In summers we have to change places because of the heat, when I arrived in Barcelona I saw water restrictions announced, although with restrictions and everything, in Mali they have always been living with much less... At the age of 18 I participated in the occupation of Sa Dragonera island. When we talked about ecology then it was almost a joke, now it is evidence.
Here he shows preparatory pieces from his Chapel for the Cathedral of Palma. Critic Dore Ashton said that she would go down in history for that work.
Dore published his book in 2008 and the Chapel was the summary of everything he had done up to that point, in painting and ceramics. As is now the Chaumont sur Loire grotto, which we inaugurated last week, a large monster's mouth weighing eight tons and four by six meters, in the middle of nature, which absorbs the painter and everyone in existence, to which we built a special oven. I like these ambitious projects, such as the UN leadership in Geneva; Now I have two or three in study, which I can't talk about yet.
How did you get into ceramics?
When I was 17 my partner was a ceramist. With her we traveled through Aragon and Extremadura, following the book by Corredor-Matheos, Llorens Artigas and Català Roca Popular Spanish Ceramics, and we met several artisans who worked with ancient techniques, it was a world that was disappearing. I looked at it then with a certain distance, like an anthropologist, but later I thought a lot about that trip. I have also closely followed the work of Joan Miró and Llorens Artigas, and that of Lucio Fontana, so different from his painting. And in Mali, at a time when I couldn't paint because there was a devilish wind, I asked some Dogon women to teach me and I started working on it. That was a Neolithic world, and when I returned to Mallorca I felt as if I were entering the 19th century. I don't have a single rope, I like to change, although 70% of my work is painting.
And what does ceramics have that paint doesn't?
I don't make many differences. The main one is the surprise. You finish a painting and what you have is what it is. You put a piece of ceramic in the oven, and if it comes out well it is because of its alchemy, if it comes out badly it is your fault. Ceramics are also a fragment of time, they remain when a society has disappeared. Very little painting remains from classical Greece, but there is an abundance of ceramics. In a ceramic fragment from Japan you recognize the history of Japan.
What works would you highlight here?
This is a summary, a small sample from the first steps in Mali to later very minimalist pieces and other very complex ones. I like to have the heads of my Dogon friends Amassagou and Amon Dolo at the beginning of the route, and the giant crab I made last year at the end. Or in the patio, the piece Gaudeamus Igitur, I made it in Africa with a chimpanzee skull and pumpkin wheels, then in terracotta and then in bronze. We have made this selection but we could have made different ones; Here I am not exhibiting, for example, a collection of philosophers' heads that I really like, which has been shown elsewhere.
He is approaching 70 years old, the age at which Picasso and Miró began to consider the creation of a foundation or museum that would bring together their work. You too?
Not yet, but I should start! The idea comes to me when I'm painting and I always tell myself “I'll think about it later, when I finish this”…
It presents self-portraits with psoriasis, with white spots, pierced with punches...
I have always had psoriasis and I have trusted Vladimir Nabokov, he said that those who had psoriasis and asthma no longer caught the plague. I haven't caught it, and in Africa I had opportunities. My pediatrician advised me “you have to treat her with contempt, ignore her.”
What would you say to Barceló about Barcelona in 1975?
Get out of here! That's what I ended up telling myself. One day in 1982 I met Daniel Giralt-Miracle and told him that he was going to Naples. He responded to me, with that formal and polite tone of his, “what a great loss for Catalan culture!” It's not Barcelona's fault, I'm always very clear about leaving places quickly, I suppose it's because of my island origin.
