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Lot Essay
'At first, I painted great whirlwinds without thinking about bullfighting. Then, I began to put bullfighters at the heart of these centrifugal forces, which pushed everything to the edges of the scene... They are big circles that occupy the central space of the canvas with a combat between shadow and light, like in a bullfight. After a bullfight, you can read what has happened in the sand of the arena. It's a beautiful metaphor for painting, as my paintings are like traces of what has past' (M. Barceló quoted in 'Palette de maîtres. 4, Mes métamorphoses', in Le Nouvel Observateur, no. 2230, 2 August 2007, p. 63).
Paseillo negro is a majestic example of Barcelós hands-on painting technique, where actual matter and weight of paint is used to throw the image into spatial relief that deftly captures the first phase of the corrida, when the matadors and their squads parade in front of the expectant crowd before receiving the key that will unleash the bulls. Ernest Hemingway memorably recorded this ceremony in his homage to bullfighting, when he described the matadors with their capes furled around their left arms, walking 'with a loose hipped stride, their arms swinging, their chins up, their eyes on the presidents 'box', before bowing with devout deference or cocky indifference, depending on their character (E. Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, London 1932, p. 54). This is a moment of mounting tension before the drama of the fight begins, when everyone's attention is drawn to the ring. Barceló has powerfully elicited this force of concentration by converting the arena seats into brooding swirls of thickly encrusted pigment that descends concentrically to the illuminated bullring. The elevated viewpoint casts the viewer as a kind of All Seeing Eye, looking down on a microcosm where the struggle between life and death, man versus nature, has been elegantly choreographed for hundreds of years.
Renowned for his use of a wide variety of mixed media that serve to bridge the gap between the reality of the viewer's world and the reality of the canvas, Barceló made it his mission from an early age to assault traditional pictorial conventions, breaking down the illusory field of receding space to create images from thick accumulations of viscous matter. Painted in 1990, this work belongs to one of the Majorcan-born artist's most celebrated series of paintings. It tackles that most Spanish of subjects-the bullfight, and the passion that is so crucial to the corrida is likewise reflected in the palpable physicality of the painting. Paseillo negro's imagery is formed from thick sand and fibre laden paints that have been dragged, dripped and gouged, creating an intensely dynamic textural surface. The process of building-up a picture in this almost sculptural way is an intuitive one for Barceló, whereby forms emerge, become subsumed, and metamorphose under the layers of heavy impasto. The bullfight paintings found their origin in this playful, experimental approach to image making. In this composition, the human players and grand architecture are reduced to almost abstract elements, while the rich, earthy surface succinctly captures the glint of the sand, the red flash of the capes, and the smouldering heat of the Mediterranean sun as it beats down on the stadium.
Barceló began his bullfight paintings after his return from a series of prolonged travels outside of Spain, most notably in Africa. As early as 1988, he painted a poster for bullfights in Nîmes, and in 1990 for Madrid, and this clearly piqued an interest in the corrida as a subject in his art. His new group of paintings, exhibited in Zurich with a striking catalogue illustrated by the photography of Lucien Clergue, marked a startling contrast to the whiteness that had begun to dominate his work. Barceló's experience of the obliterating light of the Saharan desert had stripped his paintings of colour, turning his highly textured imagery into barren, metaphysically charged landscapes. In Africa, Barceló had managed to refine his art, to escape what he sometimes viewed as the constraints of the Western artistic tradition, and to scrape away the accumulation of his education and cultural knowledge. On his return he was able to view the rituals of his homeland from a new perspective, and he began to assimilate the vitality of his recent experiences with an artistic heritage handed down to him from a very young age. It comes as no surprise, then, that Barceló has treated the quintessentially Spanish theme of bullfighting with a remarkable freshness, allowing him to rediscover and celebrate his own national identity in the new light provided by his long absences from the country.
By taking the bullfight as a theme, Barceló shows a loving rediscovery of the art historical canon that he had avoided in his travels. Many artists, both Spanish and foreign, have tackled the subject of bullfighting, most famously Francisco de Goya and Pablo Picasso, two towering giants of Spanish art. Like these two artists, Barceló's pictures explore the various stages and ceremonies, from the parades, to the entrances of the bulls, to the duel and finally to the death itself.
Barceló is an erudite and well-versed artist, deeply aware of his artistic and literary antecedents. While his predecessors were clearly enchanted by the spectacle of the bullfight, by its rituals and also by the danger, none have so daringly exposed its pure energy and power. Action and movement are as central to the execution of Barceló's bullfight paintings as they are to their content. Here, he seems to describe the act of capturing and preserving physical gestures within painting, a concept crucial to Lucio Fontana and Jackson Pollock, two artists who have been hugely influential on his practice. Paseillo negro can therefore be appreciated for the instinctive and expressive manipulation of his materials as much as for the narrative of the bullfight and its significance to Spanish culture. This is not a cold, rational or conceptual painting, but a thing of energy and raw beauty that pulses with a life. The canvas is Barceló's own arena, and the corrida is a metaphor and a parallel of his own artistic process.
Paseillo negro is a majestic example of Barcelós hands-on painting technique, where actual matter and weight of paint is used to throw the image into spatial relief that deftly captures the first phase of the corrida, when the matadors and their squads parade in front of the expectant crowd before receiving the key that will unleash the bulls. Ernest Hemingway memorably recorded this ceremony in his homage to bullfighting, when he described the matadors with their capes furled around their left arms, walking 'with a loose hipped stride, their arms swinging, their chins up, their eyes on the presidents 'box', before bowing with devout deference or cocky indifference, depending on their character (E. Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, London 1932, p. 54). This is a moment of mounting tension before the drama of the fight begins, when everyone's attention is drawn to the ring. Barceló has powerfully elicited this force of concentration by converting the arena seats into brooding swirls of thickly encrusted pigment that descends concentrically to the illuminated bullring. The elevated viewpoint casts the viewer as a kind of All Seeing Eye, looking down on a microcosm where the struggle between life and death, man versus nature, has been elegantly choreographed for hundreds of years.
Renowned for his use of a wide variety of mixed media that serve to bridge the gap between the reality of the viewer's world and the reality of the canvas, Barceló made it his mission from an early age to assault traditional pictorial conventions, breaking down the illusory field of receding space to create images from thick accumulations of viscous matter. Painted in 1990, this work belongs to one of the Majorcan-born artist's most celebrated series of paintings. It tackles that most Spanish of subjects-the bullfight, and the passion that is so crucial to the corrida is likewise reflected in the palpable physicality of the painting. Paseillo negro's imagery is formed from thick sand and fibre laden paints that have been dragged, dripped and gouged, creating an intensely dynamic textural surface. The process of building-up a picture in this almost sculptural way is an intuitive one for Barceló, whereby forms emerge, become subsumed, and metamorphose under the layers of heavy impasto. The bullfight paintings found their origin in this playful, experimental approach to image making. In this composition, the human players and grand architecture are reduced to almost abstract elements, while the rich, earthy surface succinctly captures the glint of the sand, the red flash of the capes, and the smouldering heat of the Mediterranean sun as it beats down on the stadium.
Barceló began his bullfight paintings after his return from a series of prolonged travels outside of Spain, most notably in Africa. As early as 1988, he painted a poster for bullfights in Nîmes, and in 1990 for Madrid, and this clearly piqued an interest in the corrida as a subject in his art. His new group of paintings, exhibited in Zurich with a striking catalogue illustrated by the photography of Lucien Clergue, marked a startling contrast to the whiteness that had begun to dominate his work. Barceló's experience of the obliterating light of the Saharan desert had stripped his paintings of colour, turning his highly textured imagery into barren, metaphysically charged landscapes. In Africa, Barceló had managed to refine his art, to escape what he sometimes viewed as the constraints of the Western artistic tradition, and to scrape away the accumulation of his education and cultural knowledge. On his return he was able to view the rituals of his homeland from a new perspective, and he began to assimilate the vitality of his recent experiences with an artistic heritage handed down to him from a very young age. It comes as no surprise, then, that Barceló has treated the quintessentially Spanish theme of bullfighting with a remarkable freshness, allowing him to rediscover and celebrate his own national identity in the new light provided by his long absences from the country.
By taking the bullfight as a theme, Barceló shows a loving rediscovery of the art historical canon that he had avoided in his travels. Many artists, both Spanish and foreign, have tackled the subject of bullfighting, most famously Francisco de Goya and Pablo Picasso, two towering giants of Spanish art. Like these two artists, Barceló's pictures explore the various stages and ceremonies, from the parades, to the entrances of the bulls, to the duel and finally to the death itself.
Barceló is an erudite and well-versed artist, deeply aware of his artistic and literary antecedents. While his predecessors were clearly enchanted by the spectacle of the bullfight, by its rituals and also by the danger, none have so daringly exposed its pure energy and power. Action and movement are as central to the execution of Barceló's bullfight paintings as they are to their content. Here, he seems to describe the act of capturing and preserving physical gestures within painting, a concept crucial to Lucio Fontana and Jackson Pollock, two artists who have been hugely influential on his practice. Paseillo negro can therefore be appreciated for the instinctive and expressive manipulation of his materials as much as for the narrative of the bullfight and its significance to Spanish culture. This is not a cold, rational or conceptual painting, but a thing of energy and raw beauty that pulses with a life. The canvas is Barceló's own arena, and the corrida is a metaphor and a parallel of his own artistic process.