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拍品專文
‘What interests me in still life is to work with it as organic material, to feel it as pure material. I want to try different renderings to get to the saturation of baroque still lifes. Sometimes I use the elements as a pretext to create a kind of dance inside the picture; in other words, the still life is just an excuse’ - Miquel Barceló
Majestic in its monumentality, Miquel Barceló’s mixed media painting Cabrit i Rajada (Kid and Stingray), 1994, plunges the viewer into a dreamy world of pastel hues and sandy tones. Rendered in cool whites and peachy creams with passages of warm ochre and burnt umber, its impasto palette and sculptural haute pâte surface evoke an ethereal realm which shifts between earth and sea, figuration and abstraction. A formless mass of mahogany brown in the centre of the painting transmutes into a splayed animal, limbs flailing wildly in the air. Below it, a golden sweep of watery paint morphs into a blue rimmed fish reeling in the depths of the ocean, as a biomorphic mass beside it transforms into the stingray to which the title refers. The animal, then, becomes the hapless kid, impregnated with the seaborn creature’s noxious sting. The underwater world is a recurring theme in a number of Barceló’s works, and indeed the artist recalls a fascination with subaquatic life from a young age: ‘As a teenager, I did a lot of underwater fishing. During a certain phase, I found myself spending more time underwater than on earth. The sandy bottoms of the sea striated by the waves, as the reflections of the ocean’s surface seemed deserted, nothing…’ (M. Barceló, quoted in Miquel Barceló, exh. cat., London, Ben Brown Fine Arts, 2011, p. 10). Engaging the viewer through a powerful physicality of richly textured surface, Barceló combines oil paint with organic matter to present a visceral world that speaks to our most raw and primal instincts.A great lover of travel, Barceló divided his time from the late 1980s onwards between Paris, Majorca, and Mali. Profoundly influenced by the scorching sunlight that would beat down over vast stretches of arid desert, he returned to West Africa countless times, an artist forever in search of his muse. To stand in front of this and many of Barceló’s large-scale canvases is a sublime and immersive experience. The vast scale absorbs us, the world around diminished by the opulent vigour of the enigmatic surrounding space: impalpable, a multitude of connotations are inferred, from the sandy seabed and rippling pools of coral, to fleshy skin tones and dizzying panoramas of a world seen from up high. Paint becomes pure momentum: undulating flecks and swirls reveal a deft manipulation of tone and density, whilst the mixed media elements blur the line between image and represented object, taking trompe-l’oeil to a new and subversive level. At once a celebration of the hidden world of science and a deliberate disruption of the natural order of things, Cabrit i Rajada breathes life into nature’s invisible domain.
Majestic in its monumentality, Miquel Barceló’s mixed media painting Cabrit i Rajada (Kid and Stingray), 1994, plunges the viewer into a dreamy world of pastel hues and sandy tones. Rendered in cool whites and peachy creams with passages of warm ochre and burnt umber, its impasto palette and sculptural haute pâte surface evoke an ethereal realm which shifts between earth and sea, figuration and abstraction. A formless mass of mahogany brown in the centre of the painting transmutes into a splayed animal, limbs flailing wildly in the air. Below it, a golden sweep of watery paint morphs into a blue rimmed fish reeling in the depths of the ocean, as a biomorphic mass beside it transforms into the stingray to which the title refers. The animal, then, becomes the hapless kid, impregnated with the seaborn creature’s noxious sting. The underwater world is a recurring theme in a number of Barceló’s works, and indeed the artist recalls a fascination with subaquatic life from a young age: ‘As a teenager, I did a lot of underwater fishing. During a certain phase, I found myself spending more time underwater than on earth. The sandy bottoms of the sea striated by the waves, as the reflections of the ocean’s surface seemed deserted, nothing…’ (M. Barceló, quoted in Miquel Barceló, exh. cat., London, Ben Brown Fine Arts, 2011, p. 10). Engaging the viewer through a powerful physicality of richly textured surface, Barceló combines oil paint with organic matter to present a visceral world that speaks to our most raw and primal instincts.A great lover of travel, Barceló divided his time from the late 1980s onwards between Paris, Majorca, and Mali. Profoundly influenced by the scorching sunlight that would beat down over vast stretches of arid desert, he returned to West Africa countless times, an artist forever in search of his muse. To stand in front of this and many of Barceló’s large-scale canvases is a sublime and immersive experience. The vast scale absorbs us, the world around diminished by the opulent vigour of the enigmatic surrounding space: impalpable, a multitude of connotations are inferred, from the sandy seabed and rippling pools of coral, to fleshy skin tones and dizzying panoramas of a world seen from up high. Paint becomes pure momentum: undulating flecks and swirls reveal a deft manipulation of tone and density, whilst the mixed media elements blur the line between image and represented object, taking trompe-l’oeil to a new and subversive level. At once a celebration of the hidden world of science and a deliberate disruption of the natural order of things, Cabrit i Rajada breathes life into nature’s invisible domain.