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Lot Essay
Included in Miquel Barceló’s 1994 retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, Restaurant chinois avec grenouilles (Chinese Restaurant with Frogs) is a monumental feast for the senses. Spanning three metres wide, it is an expressionistic and experimental reboot of the traditional Spanish bodegón: a still-life composition featuring foodstuffs. Where pictures of that genre in the Prado and the Louvre often employ Old Masterly trompe-l’oeil, Barceló has layered his work with elements as varied as rice, oil paint and cigarette ends, blurring the boundary between real world and representation—and between cookery and painting. Chopsticks, apple-halves and a platter of frogs’ legs are scattered across a vast, roiling yellow table, framed within graphic red edges; a dog-like creature peeks from behind one curlicued leg, sniffing at the frogs’ discarded heads below. A vase holds a dark branch, blooming with a single flower. Lacquered screens gouged and patterned with further branches decorate the walls, creating paintings within the painting. It is a visceral, radical and stickily tangible vision, made all the more immersive by its vast scale.
1985 was a watershed year for Barceló. Another massive bodegón, La gran cena Española (1985), became the first of his works to enter a public collection—it is now in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. That same year, he was approached by the veteran art dealer Leo Castelli, who wished to represent him in the United States; he was also given a prestigious show of some of his recent paintings, which travelled from the CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux to the Palacio de Velázquez, Madrid and The Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston.
During the mid-1980s, Barceló was largely based in Paris. For six months in 1984, he had worked in a large 19th-century church on the rue d’Ulm, where his pictures became ever more colossal; the expansion continued in his studio on the Avenue de Breteuil, where he focused on the bodegón and the library as parallel themes. Barceló saw literature and the culinary world as equally worthy of attention: a close friend to many poets, and deeply influenced by such works as Dante’s Divine Comedy, he has also compared himself to a ‘baker’, mixing, transforming and plunging into the ingredients of his art. The still-life, represented by pictures of soup, vegetables, sauce-spattered kitchens and Chinese restaurants, allowed him to reimagine the substance of painting as the stuff of life itself. Making witty, self-referential and wildly inventive use of organic material, works like Restaurant chinois avec grenouilles present food for the mind and body alike.
1985 was a watershed year for Barceló. Another massive bodegón, La gran cena Española (1985), became the first of his works to enter a public collection—it is now in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. That same year, he was approached by the veteran art dealer Leo Castelli, who wished to represent him in the United States; he was also given a prestigious show of some of his recent paintings, which travelled from the CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux to the Palacio de Velázquez, Madrid and The Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston.
During the mid-1980s, Barceló was largely based in Paris. For six months in 1984, he had worked in a large 19th-century church on the rue d’Ulm, where his pictures became ever more colossal; the expansion continued in his studio on the Avenue de Breteuil, where he focused on the bodegón and the library as parallel themes. Barceló saw literature and the culinary world as equally worthy of attention: a close friend to many poets, and deeply influenced by such works as Dante’s Divine Comedy, he has also compared himself to a ‘baker’, mixing, transforming and plunging into the ingredients of his art. The still-life, represented by pictures of soup, vegetables, sauce-spattered kitchens and Chinese restaurants, allowed him to reimagine the substance of painting as the stuff of life itself. Making witty, self-referential and wildly inventive use of organic material, works like Restaurant chinois avec grenouilles present food for the mind and body alike.