Miquel Barceló with Jurriaan Benschop An interview with the artist

Until the end of June, Miquel Barceló has an exhibition of his ceramic works at La Pedrera, the signature building of Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona. On the occasion, the Rail spoke with the artist, who, since his appearance in the 1970s, has been working in diverse media such as sculpture, painting, printmaking, and ceramics. Among the large-scale projects that he realized in his later career are ceramic decorations for a chapel in the Cathedral of Mallorca and a giant dome painting in the United Nations building in Geneva. In his work, Barceló evokes a sense of the timeless, and establishes a connection to earliest forms of cave painting. In his universe, making art seems a way of rooting ourselves. The company of nature and animals is essential to the artist, who shares his time between the island of Mallorca and Paris and has also lived for extended periods in a village in Mali.

Jurriaan Benschop (Rail): Currently you have an exhibition at La Pedrera in Barcelona, one of Gaudí’s signature buildings, also known as Casa Milà. Did the presence of Gaudí influence the ceramic works that you brought, or the way to present them?

Miquel Barceló: For the show in Barcelona we opened all the windows of the Pedrera. Usually they show paintings, often in dark rooms. You do not see the city outside. For my show we removed everything from the walls, opened up the windows. It has become a very light and clear space. But you remember I did this work in the Cathedral of Mallorca. There I really worked with Gaudí.

Rail: In the cathedral you made a meters high, curved ceramic wall with decorations for the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament. The iconography is based on the biblical miracle of Jesus feeding a crowd with five loaves and two fishes. It was inaugurated in 2007.

Barceló: In the beginning of twentieth century Gaudí changed the conception of the cathedral. When I made the work he was my neighbor and my partner in crime, so to speak. It was like having a long conversation with him about the space and about what is decorative art or ornament, how as an artist we can work with the sacred, with a history of centuries and with the genius loci. Mallorca is my own place, which made it very interesting. I know the place.

Rail: For the cathedral you had long conversations with the bishop. Had you been raised Catholic or in other ways religious?

Barceló: No, I have always been agnostic, but I think that is not relevant here. When you see works of Michelangelo, Donatello, or Tintoretto, you also do not think about that. It is not important if he was Catholic or Muslim or Jewish.

Rail: But I could imagine your work in general as a kind of spiritual practice.

Barceló: Probably because, if you look at the art from the caves, from Chauvet until now, 99.9 percent is religious and funerary, most of the time. Only in the last century has that changed. Now we believe art is not religious, but maybe it is too… We don’t know.

Rail: You did a lot of research into the cave paintings, looking closely into the style of the painters. There are different theories about what exactly was the drive for these people to make the paintings on the walls. What is your take? Why did they want to make the paintings?

Barceló: I think the cave paintings in Chauvet, Altamira, or Lascaux are made for exactly the same reasons that I do my paintings. It comes from the very human necessity, like poetry. You can feel the individuality, which is very interesting. It is never collective work, in the cave, you see the individual. The oldest cave paintings we know are in Chauvet, which are 36,000 years old. I was maybe ten times visiting Chauvet as I am part of the scientific committee, I went many times with the people who do research and they found the print of a hand in the wall, probably the left hand of the person that was painting, he was looking for support on the wall. Then it was discovered that his little finger was broken. Through this hand we know approximately how high was the painter who did it, something like 160 centimeters. It is like the signature of the artist. He was fantastic, you see he erased the other art to put his own art but then nobody from the other people at work on the site removed his work. It is like, say Raphael, maybe he removed Gothic frescoes to put his painting on top, but then nobody removed Raphael’s because it is so good. And that is exactly the same thing. It is fantastic to see this palimpsest of art and to see the individuality of that.

Rail: For you, this is the first painting.

Barceló: Chauvet, yes, is the first I know, the oldest one. Recently I have been working in Paris on big canvases with relief, a bit like the cave paintings, and also with charcoal and pigments as used in the cave. And the subjects are also the same, the heads of the horse, of other animals. For me, the funny question is: where is the modernity? Because it’s the same chemistry, the same pigments, and the same subjects and also the technique is very, very close. Maybe the modernity is in the canvas that we can move, which is different from a cave. But it’s very interesting. I think that leads to the definition of postmodernism, and why we make art. It is the opposite of this idea of avant-garde and art that erases the one that is made before.