.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘In a bullfight, you can read what happened in the sand; it’s a beautiful metaphor of painting because my paintings are like traces of what has happened there, all that happens in the head, in fact. The picture object is a bit like the sand of the arena, a sort of detritus of what took place there’ —M. BARCELÓ
‘I put myself in the middle of the picture, making turns, with the same movements as a bullfighter. The sand in the ring is full of footmarks and becomes the setting in which to paint. The arena takes up the whole scene, almost leaving out the crowd from the picture. The painting is overfull’—M. BARCELÓ
‘As in bullfighting, I believe, one doesn’t paint with ideas. The painting happens outside ideas, in contradiction to ideas even, generating ideas. That is why such silent art forms spawn so many words. This is where painting and bullfighting resemble each other, in the verbosity which accompanies them, as though their own silence was so unbearable that it needed pasodobles and infinite pages. Exorcisms for the bedazzled. After all, it is a simple exercise, like a bird eating ants from a skull’ —M. BARCELÓ
A swirling, centrifugal vortex of visceral energy and drama, Pase de Pecho is an outstanding work from Miquel Barceló’s celebrated series of bullfight paintings. In thick, impastoed swathes of paint and sand, baked golden as if by the heat of the afternoon sun, the artist portrays a single moment in the face-off between man and beast: the ‘pase de pecho’, in which the torero uses his red cape (muleta) to terminate a series of linked passes. Flashes of sanguine pigment draw the eye to the centre of the composition, punctuating the earthbound terrain of ochre and charcoal. The edges of the arena fan outwards in rapid radial motion, built to near-sculptural proportions at they burst from the confines of the canvas. Seen from above, the fatal dance is suspended at its climax, infused with an unearthly silence as the crowds of spectators fade into abstraction. Executed in 1990, the year that the corrida first appeared as a subject in Barceló’s oeuvre, the work posits the ballet of the bullfight as a metaphor for painting itself. The marks left in the sand by the duel directly correspond with the scars inflicted by the artist on the canvas, with each work in the series depicting a different stage of the conflict. ‘I put myself in the middle of the picture, making turns, with the same movements as a bullfighter’, he explains. ‘The sand in the ring is full of footmarks and becomes the setting in which to paint’ (M. Barceló, quoted in Miquel Barceló: Obra sobre papel 1979-1999, exh. cat., Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 1999, p. v). In his engagement with one of Spain’s most ancient cultural traditions, Barceló places himself within a long line of artistic and literary interpretations, including those of Francisco de Goya, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Ernest Hemingway. Included in the artist’s exhibition Mapamundi at the Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 2002, as well as his solo show Sol y Sombra at the Musée Picasso, Paris, last year, the present work captures the battle at its peak, immortalizing the primal encounter between torero and toro.
In the late 1980s, Barceló had travelled to the African desert in a bid to reinvigorate his practice. ‘I went because my paintings had become white, not by not putting anything on them, but by erasing everything’, he explained. ‘The white was not due to absence, but came from avoiding excess. I went to the desert because my paintings seemed like a desert, even though I was painting them in New York. Once in the desert I began to paint with colour again’ (M. Barceló, 1996, quoted in Miquel Barceló: Mapamundi, exh. cat., Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 2002, p. 18). Upon his return to Spain, the corrida – with its nationalistic spectacle of red and gold – re-entered his imagination. As early as 1988, he had painted a poster for a bullfighting festival in Nîmes – and later for Madrid – sparking an intoxicating obsession with the subject that would come to a head in the summer of 1990. The struggle between man and nature that lies at the heart of the bullfight became an allegory for his own painterly process, conceived as a corporeal dialogue between artist and medium. ‘In a bullfight, you can read what happened in the sand’, he explains; ‘it’s a beautiful metaphor of painting because my paintings are like traces of what has happened there, all that happens in the head, in fact. The picture object is a bit like the sand of the arena, a sort of detritus of what took place there’ (M. Barceló, quoted in Miquel Barceló: Mapamundi, exh. cat., Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 2002, p. 98).
Thus, in the present work, the physical nature of Barceló’s technique gives rise to a canvas that appears before the viewer like a relic of the corrida itself: an arid slab of earth stained with the marks of combat. From certain angles, we are positioned as spectators watching the fight unfold from above; from others, the painting is nothing more than a footprint in the dust – a trace of a battle already extinguished. Like Jackson Pollock’s action paintings, or the coarse surfaces of Antoni Tàpies, the work quivers with residual energy of lived gestures. More than any other group of works in his oeuvre, these canvases speak directly to Barceló’s aesthetic philosophy: art, for him, is not a rational or conceptual mode of expression, but rather an intuitive, primal outpouring powered by raw, carnal energy. ‘As in bullfighting, I believe, one doesn’t paint with ideas’, he explains. ‘The painting happens outside ideas, in contradiction to ideas even, generating ideas. That is why such silent art forms spawn so many words. This is where painting and bullfighting resemble each other, in the verbosity which accompanies them, as though their own silence was so unbearable that it needed pasodobles and infinite pages. Exorcisms for the bedazzled. After all, it is a simple exercise, like a bird eating ants from a skull’ (M. Barceló, quoted in Miquel Barceló 1987-1997, exh. cat., Museu d’Art Contemporani De Barcelona, Barcelona, 1998, p. 112). In Pase de Pecho, this belief is brought to bear on a work of extraordinary material power, fossilizing the fleeting pageant of life and death in its concrete depths.
‘I put myself in the middle of the picture, making turns, with the same movements as a bullfighter. The sand in the ring is full of footmarks and becomes the setting in which to paint. The arena takes up the whole scene, almost leaving out the crowd from the picture. The painting is overfull’—M. BARCELÓ
‘As in bullfighting, I believe, one doesn’t paint with ideas. The painting happens outside ideas, in contradiction to ideas even, generating ideas. That is why such silent art forms spawn so many words. This is where painting and bullfighting resemble each other, in the verbosity which accompanies them, as though their own silence was so unbearable that it needed pasodobles and infinite pages. Exorcisms for the bedazzled. After all, it is a simple exercise, like a bird eating ants from a skull’ —M. BARCELÓ
A swirling, centrifugal vortex of visceral energy and drama, Pase de Pecho is an outstanding work from Miquel Barceló’s celebrated series of bullfight paintings. In thick, impastoed swathes of paint and sand, baked golden as if by the heat of the afternoon sun, the artist portrays a single moment in the face-off between man and beast: the ‘pase de pecho’, in which the torero uses his red cape (muleta) to terminate a series of linked passes. Flashes of sanguine pigment draw the eye to the centre of the composition, punctuating the earthbound terrain of ochre and charcoal. The edges of the arena fan outwards in rapid radial motion, built to near-sculptural proportions at they burst from the confines of the canvas. Seen from above, the fatal dance is suspended at its climax, infused with an unearthly silence as the crowds of spectators fade into abstraction. Executed in 1990, the year that the corrida first appeared as a subject in Barceló’s oeuvre, the work posits the ballet of the bullfight as a metaphor for painting itself. The marks left in the sand by the duel directly correspond with the scars inflicted by the artist on the canvas, with each work in the series depicting a different stage of the conflict. ‘I put myself in the middle of the picture, making turns, with the same movements as a bullfighter’, he explains. ‘The sand in the ring is full of footmarks and becomes the setting in which to paint’ (M. Barceló, quoted in Miquel Barceló: Obra sobre papel 1979-1999, exh. cat., Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 1999, p. v). In his engagement with one of Spain’s most ancient cultural traditions, Barceló places himself within a long line of artistic and literary interpretations, including those of Francisco de Goya, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Ernest Hemingway. Included in the artist’s exhibition Mapamundi at the Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 2002, as well as his solo show Sol y Sombra at the Musée Picasso, Paris, last year, the present work captures the battle at its peak, immortalizing the primal encounter between torero and toro.
In the late 1980s, Barceló had travelled to the African desert in a bid to reinvigorate his practice. ‘I went because my paintings had become white, not by not putting anything on them, but by erasing everything’, he explained. ‘The white was not due to absence, but came from avoiding excess. I went to the desert because my paintings seemed like a desert, even though I was painting them in New York. Once in the desert I began to paint with colour again’ (M. Barceló, 1996, quoted in Miquel Barceló: Mapamundi, exh. cat., Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 2002, p. 18). Upon his return to Spain, the corrida – with its nationalistic spectacle of red and gold – re-entered his imagination. As early as 1988, he had painted a poster for a bullfighting festival in Nîmes – and later for Madrid – sparking an intoxicating obsession with the subject that would come to a head in the summer of 1990. The struggle between man and nature that lies at the heart of the bullfight became an allegory for his own painterly process, conceived as a corporeal dialogue between artist and medium. ‘In a bullfight, you can read what happened in the sand’, he explains; ‘it’s a beautiful metaphor of painting because my paintings are like traces of what has happened there, all that happens in the head, in fact. The picture object is a bit like the sand of the arena, a sort of detritus of what took place there’ (M. Barceló, quoted in Miquel Barceló: Mapamundi, exh. cat., Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 2002, p. 98).
Thus, in the present work, the physical nature of Barceló’s technique gives rise to a canvas that appears before the viewer like a relic of the corrida itself: an arid slab of earth stained with the marks of combat. From certain angles, we are positioned as spectators watching the fight unfold from above; from others, the painting is nothing more than a footprint in the dust – a trace of a battle already extinguished. Like Jackson Pollock’s action paintings, or the coarse surfaces of Antoni Tàpies, the work quivers with residual energy of lived gestures. More than any other group of works in his oeuvre, these canvases speak directly to Barceló’s aesthetic philosophy: art, for him, is not a rational or conceptual mode of expression, but rather an intuitive, primal outpouring powered by raw, carnal energy. ‘As in bullfighting, I believe, one doesn’t paint with ideas’, he explains. ‘The painting happens outside ideas, in contradiction to ideas even, generating ideas. That is why such silent art forms spawn so many words. This is where painting and bullfighting resemble each other, in the verbosity which accompanies them, as though their own silence was so unbearable that it needed pasodobles and infinite pages. Exorcisms for the bedazzled. After all, it is a simple exercise, like a bird eating ants from a skull’ (M. Barceló, quoted in Miquel Barceló 1987-1997, exh. cat., Museu d’Art Contemporani De Barcelona, Barcelona, 1998, p. 112). In Pase de Pecho, this belief is brought to bear on a work of extraordinary material power, fossilizing the fleeting pageant of life and death in its concrete depths.