Scarifications Group exhibition featuring Miquel Barceló at Musée Barbier-Mueller in Geneva, Switzerland

The fruit of an idea that germinated in 2008 during a lunch bringing together Miquel Barceló, his friends Monique and Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller as well as Laurence Mattet, then director of the museum, this exhibition and the accompanying catalog offer a fruitful dialogue between the artist's paintings, drawings, prints and ceramics, and pieces from the Barbier-Mueller collections.

 The theme that brings them together, that of scarifications, is striking, undoubtedly because of the indelible mark it leaves on the eye. She guided the selection of works that Miquel Barceló made in his own corpus and that the Barbier-Mueller museum made in the eponymous collections. The artist works on his creations like flesh that he graffitis, deforms, tears, pricks or discolors. The “skins” of a Senufo anthropomorphic statuette, a Baule mask, a pendant face from the kingdom of Benin, among others, bear witness to the same operation. But the drawings that run through them sanction an act desired by tradition, a passage, a transformation.

 Cuts, scratches, discolorations or burns are expressions of an artistic or ritual practice. Creative gestures, marks of belonging, traces with prophylactic, therapeutic, aesthetic and even erotic virtues, they constitute the meeting point of a myriad of visual experiences.