Miquel Barceló Grisailles: Banquet of Light

The exhibition Grisailles: Banquet of Light will present Miquel Barceló’s new series of large-scale still lifes, featuring banquets made up of sea life, flowers and ossified creatures. Rendered in monochromatic hues overlaid with translucent layers of colour, the artist’s new body of works pays homage to the tradition of grisaille painting. The exhibition, which takes place in Thaddaeus Ropac’s Seoul space, will be punctuated by paintings of bulls, a symbol of strength.

For Miquel Barceló, one of Spain’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, painting is a visceral way of relating himself to the world. Still life has been present in his work since the 1980s. The genre allows him to explore the objects and visual codes of the natural world around him, in particular the sea life that surrounds him on his native island of Mallorca, in the Mediterranean Sea. His practice is also grounded in a deep knowledge of the history of art. In the series on view in the exhibition, he draws on 17th-century Dutch painting and the Spanish bodegón to offer a new interpretation of still life painting that is anchored in his own relationship to the sea, sustenance and the cycle of life. Reprising the genre’s traditional codes, he bisects his canvases with life-sized tables, inviting visitors to participate in the curious banquet before them where they might contemplate their relationship with abundance.

Throughout the exhibition, Miquel Barceló adopts a variation on the traditional grisaille technique, applying translucent layers of colour over a monochromatic underpainting. The result is an airy and loosely composed treatment of still life, which allows the grain of the canvas to show behind the thin layers of ink and acrylic in red, pink, blue and yellow. The soft outlines of the elements depicted by the artist evoke the interconnectedness of the natural world, but also its interdependence, as each creature plays a fundamental structural role in the fragile scenes. Somewhere between dream and reality, they look ready to float away if any one component should fall. Like afterimages, the paintings might evoke, as Miquel Barceló describes it, ‘a table from Pompeii [...] or the frozen ashes of things.’

Among the objects and creatures on display can be found a number of highly symbolic elements reminiscent of the vanitas genre that became popular in Europe in the Renaissance as a warning against overindulgence. Knives, skulls and books act as memento mori, reminding viewers of their own mortality. They are contrasted by the vegetal elements: bouquets of flowers and bowls of fruit, which symbolise life and rebirth. Across the works on view, the feast is populated with the sea creatures – eels and octopi, shrimp and sea urchins – that the artist encounters daily on the island where he lives and works. For Miquel Barceló, the intertwined creatures spilling out of one another suggest a comment on the precarity of plenitude and on the value of a profound connection with nature. An activist and advocate for the environment, Miquel Barceló encourages the viewer to revalorise the treasures we find on our tables.

One can imagine a bustling human presence around the set tables, but the human is absent. Yet the works are animated with a vital energy, challenging the assumption that still lifes always depict inanimate objects. ‘It's obvious that they are alive and well,’ says the artist of his creatures. In one painting, a dog sits by the table, observing the scene hungrily, while in others, red grounds seem to be rolling in constant movement, like seas of wine teeming with swimming marine life. Elsewhere, bulls recall the animals painted on the walls of prehistoric caves, which have long been a source of fascination for Miquel Barceló. With their backs laid out like tables, they stare out at the viewer with one wide eye, as if inviting them to participate in the feast, which is poised between the conviviality of a living banquet and the fragility of a scene suspended in time and space.

Miquel Barceló compares the act of painting to ‘breathing life’ into his canvases. This life infuses the delicate materiality of the grisaille paintings. As what he describes as the ‘dusty and sizzling’ charcoal mingles with vibrant pigment blown directly onto the canvas, elsewhere, gentle impasto accumulates like sea foam or lichen in the white underlay. Presence is balanced with absence, colour with monochrome, harmony with precarity, abundance with scarcity, life with death. Inviting viewers into this suspension, the exhibition encourages us to engage with the renewal and decay at the heart of some of the most pressing questions of contemporary life.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Alberto Manguel, as well as reflections by the artist on each work illustrated.